A Delicate Balance – Letter from Nicaragua

The first time a stranger called me “madre” (mother), I thought I’d heard it wrong; I was still learning Spanish. In my early 20s, striking out on my own, with kids still a distant dream, my first reaction was to take it as an insult.

But it didn’t take long to learn that mothers are revered here in Nicaragua. It’s as if you’re not really a woman until you’ve had children. Mother’s Day is a half-day holiday and most workplaces have celebrations to honour the mothers on staff. At SOYNICA, where I work with an all-female staff, the women with no children serve the mothers cake and present each of them with a flower.

This custom feels out of place because we’ve always worked to empower women, and even now that I’m on the receiving end, I feel uncomfortable with the reverence paid to mothers. Father’s Day dulls in comparison, which is surely no coincidence in this macho culture.

If there’s something I’ve learned in the last five years (I had my first son in 2008 and my second two years later), it’s that living in a country of the Global South is one thing, but having kids in the South is a whole different ball game! After 16 years living in Central America, I was pretty sure I’d seen it all and done it all … until motherhood began. I learned more about local beliefs and ideas—ideas that seemed crazy to me—like people with the ability to give a newborn baby the “evil eye.” Even my Catholic-turned-Pentecostal mother-in-law bought our firstborn a red suit “to protect him” from the devil or evil spirits, and she put a little rolled-up red thread on his forehead to make his hiccups go away. I drew the line at a traditional “deer-eye” seed bracelet my brother-in-law wanted to give the baby.

Then there are the practical logistics, like figuring out what to do with baby Jeremy when I went back to work. In a culture where grandmas are readily available to look after babies, daycares haven’t really caught on. When my boys were born in Guatemala, their nearest grandma was hundreds of kilometres away in Nicaragua; the other one was 10 times that distance, up in Canada. Thankfully, we found a wonderful young woman to look after baby Jeremy, and although she used the traditional Mayan Quiché dress, she opted to use my commercial baby carrier instead of the length of woven fabric most Mayan women still use—though with baby wraps being so trendy in North America right now, maybe she’ll stick with the traditional method once she has her own children.

At 20 months, we sent Jeremy to preschool for the mornings, and while flabbergasted that we had to provide them, I rather enjoyed buying him the school supplies they requested. Homework before he was even toilet trained seemed a stretch though!

It took me years of living in Nicaragua to even begin to come to terms with the extreme poverty gap (and I doubt I’ll ever be able to accept it), and explaining it to a child is a new challenge.

Our boys see both sides of this gap manifested daily, from the beggars, including children, to the wagon used for garbage collection in the muddy, poor settlements, contrasted with the truck in wealthier, paved neighbourhoods.

I’m glad for situations that provoke reflection, but Jeremy’s questions out of the blue tend to take me by surprise. While I’m tempted to use them as teaching moments, I need to tread carefully between provoking pity for the poor or envy of the rich.

Trying to pass a horse and cart on the road one day provoked Jeremy’s question, “Those people have a horse because they don’t have a car, right, Mummy?” He said it so matter-of-factly that I was hesitant to try to answer truthfully—starting with the fact that they would probably prefer to have a car.

There’s a long road ahead of trying to set a good example for our boys in this society of haves and have-nots. At least for my husband, Nelson, as with most Nicaraguans, charity comes naturally; they don’t have all the western baggage that comes with philanthropy.

I hope that our actions and reflections, and the songs we sing at Batahola church like, “Vos sos el Dios de los Pobres” (“You are the God of the Poor”) will help Jeremy and Dieguito to develop humility, compassion, and aspiration to serve and make a difference in their country.