Learning How to Love Nicaragua

An entry I wrote for the Nicaragua Fulbright Network, looking back on my Fulbright experience as I enter my grant period's last official month

My I first met Nicaragua in May of 2011. I had already had a variety of short and long term relationships with Latin American countries, and each of them remains with me as a fond memory, a lingering challenge, a fading resentment. Each has been enriching and worthwhile. But never did a place so hook me like Nicaragua. One could say that when I got to know Nicaragua for the first time, I fell in love. And as in any love affair, my relationship with it in the subsequent years has been complicated.

Before coming to Nicaragua as a Fulbright Fellow, I visited twice for about a month each time. On my first visit, I saw Nicaragua through the eyes of an enthusiastic student of development. I was involved in founding a student organization at West Virginia University called Fair Trade 2.0 of WVU. The objective was to work with coffee cooperative La Hermandad by raising funds to invest in income diversification projects on their farm.

Fair Trade 2.0 lives on! A picture from
current members on campus, Oct 2013

For 6 weeks I lived with the then-president of the cooperative and his family in the town of San Ramón, Matagalpa. As a representative of Fair Trade 2.0, together with the cooperative we chose to invest in a guest house on the farm that would serve as the first site for realizing an agro-ecotourism project. Our investment was supported by an unconventional micro-investor called The Working World, which later became one of my two Fulbright sponsors. Today I realize that what hooked me on Nicaragua after that first trip was the intensity of the relationship I built with the cooperative not only through shared time, but also through shared work.

A recent photo from a hike with some
coop members and the WVU professor
who made the connection with the coop

College students and others who volunteer at home to “help” people in developing countries rarely get to hear a “thank you” from the mouths of those they serve. They rarely get the chance to put in the work to do something like develop a budget or cook a meal together. More importantly, though, they rarely get to go through the pain of an awkward first meeting in which those being “helped” only have a vague sense of who you are and why you are there. They rarely get to a point in the relationship where they experience push back on how their organization is setting its priorities, or begin to understand problematic relationships and power dynamics internal to the community they’re supporting.

What comes out of these sometimes very challenging experiences is learning to understand that in development work, trust and respect are earned and not bought. I knew after this first visit that I wanted to keep earning the trust and respect of this cooperative and others. So in the following months I completed my Fulbright application.

I applied for my Fulbright research grant in October of 2011. My proposal was to complete an ambitious, overarching assessment of the country’s microfinance industry. I had encountered microfinance in my undergraduate studies, and, still naïve, was surprised to hear from many Nicaraguans on my first visit that they felt ambivalence toward the well-known service. My interest in the subject was further compounded when, on a bus ride from Managua to Matagalpa, I was stuck in a blockade that was organize by members of the No Pago Movement, a relatively short lived but active anti-microfinance movement that was organized at the time. I decided that it was my job to get to the bottom of where Nicaragua’s antagonistic sentiments toward microfinance were coming from.

In the time between my initial application and second trip to Nicaragua in May 2012, the No Pago Movement had dissipated, the students’ work with La Hermandad had continued with ups and downs, and I had graduated without an answer on whether I won the grant and fading hope. My second visit was as a trip facilitator on Fair Trade 2.0’s first student trip to the farm, during which I had the opportunity to see Nicaragua through not only my own eyes, but those of others from the group. The students’ inquisitiveness at sights, sounds, and smells that I’d never noticed and astute observations about development and our work with the cooperative rekindled my own curiosity and enthusiasm. When I finally heard that I got the grant a couple weeks after returning home, I was ecstatic.

Local Working World staff members Lili and
Aracely prepare for a meeting with a coop

Finally, I arrived in Nicaragua to begin my Fulbright research in February 2013. Scaling down my original proposal, my work has focused specifically on cooperative microfinance. In the first half of my grant period I completed an institutional ethnography on The Working World in the city of León. The Working World is based in New York, and was founded in Argentina in the early 2000s to support the grassroots recovered factory movement. They have been working in cooperative finance in Nicaragua since 2009. My research has looked at the ways they negotiate their methodology and institutional values to fit into a landscape that is drastically different from the one in which they started.

Some of the most interesting elements have been their focus on working with low-capital start-ups in a largely rural economy rather than well-established businesses in an industrial economy; the way the staff implements and enforces loan repayment using the NGO’s shared risk policy (they require no collateral and instead share the investment risk with their coops); and their struggle to create a sense of agency within a government-driven movement that is politically charged and shaped by national economic development goals and job creation, not community activism.

In the second half of my grant period, I have focusing on getting a wider view of cooperative finance and development in the northern department of Matagalpa, where the country’s cooperative history began and has borne more fruit than on the Pacific Coast. Everywhere feelings toward Nicaraguan cooperativism are mixed and emotional. In cooperative businesses, decisions like how to access financing or whether to integrate members versus hire workers are not solely professional; rather these choices are made in the context in a complex weave of social and political relationships that are unique to Nicaragua’s cooperative history.

In the North, I have frequently come across a cynical view of cooperativism that counter’s The Working World’s institutionalized idealism. For many, it is little more than an extensive system of patronage; one that keeps the poor afloat just enough not to insight a second revolution, and maintains the current political class in power. I do not deny that this sentiment holds its own kind of truth.

My response to those bitterest of critics, though, is to consider that in the United States we also have deeply ingrained patronage networks. The difference is that instead of directly incorporating the poor, they cater to the wealthiest Americans and make no motions to create new modes of capital distribution. In the long run we’ll see which is more sustainable.

Two examples of fine
campesina cooks,
mother and daugher

As far as my personal experience, I have gone through emotional and physical extremes unlike anything I have experienced in years. I have been disappointed by profound social ills like machismo and the lack of simple pleasures like Thai food. I have gone from being the lowest to the highest weight I've been in 5 years, finally settling somewhere in the middle. I have been challenged to find motivation in Leon’s suffocating April heat, or after a night of sleep interrupted by irrational firework displays.

Some mornings my stomach can fill with revulsion at youth tossing litter on the streets, men hissing vulgar comments from doorways, and mothers pouring Coca-Cola into their baby's bottles. But by the afternoon I will be reveling in the afterglow of a fascinating conversation with a seasoned cooperative activist who has inspired in me tremendous positivity and insight. I'll feel satisfied by a delicious home cooked meal by one of Nicaragua’s countless expert campesina chefs, and stand marveling at a beautiful sunset over the rolling green mountains of the North or on of the West’s towering volcanoes.

Not a mountain sunset, but a partiuclarly
stunning one nonetheless, Playa Jiquilillo

After 9 months, I still love Nicaragua. But it has become a more mature, critical love. In loving it, I have learned that it’s time to let go of the disappointment that inevitably results from infatuation. It’s time to relieve both it and myself of the unreasonably high standards that I once had. I have learned to love it for all its ugliness and imperfection as much as for its human warmth and its beautiful landscapes. I have learned to treat it with respect, and to acknowledge that it has the right to make mistakes, to grow from them, and to always push back against me and my expectations.

**Note: This post was inspired in part by Pico Iyer's brilliant essay, "Why We Travel"