Jueves Santo

Jueves Santo (24/3/2016)

Por Sage y Moses

We started our day with a goodbye, enjoying breakfast with our host families before heading to a nearby art education Christian Base Community (CBC) to meet with the coordinator and an art instructor, as well as to see some lovely art created by the students. It sparked much excellent conversation about birth control, micro-finance, and the potentialities of art and therapy. We were pleasantly surprised to see Daisy from Tuesday’s CBC community meeting.

Tom had a scare when we went to a local coffee shop without telling him (he claims). We saw him sprinting down the street, aflutter. Geoff hailed him from the threshold of the establishment. He calmed down after a cup of iced coffee with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry.

We then returned to Matagalpa to meet Ernesto’s boss, Noelia at El Balcón. She spoke to us about the proposed canal that is to run across Nicaragua.

Noelia Corrales and Ernesto Ocampo speaking to Stanford class

The truth is truly stranger than fiction, and the more we learned the more baffled we became. This canal is bad news.  It will be twice the depth and more than triple the length of the Panama Canal, and will cut through indigenous lands in the East as well as constitutionally protected wildlife reserves.  Polling suggests that the canal proposal is quite popular among Nicaraguans, many of whom believe it will bring the country out of poverty.  However, we struggled to find any evidence to support the claim that the canal will benefit Nicaragua, based on the highly unfavorable terms of the contract negotiated with the Chinese company financing the project, even without accounting for the massive environmental destruction.

At lunch, we met Ernesto’s sister, who owns El Balcón, and thanked her for providing us with delicious food and a great meeting space.  Once we finished our meal, we left for Masaya, a couple hours to the south of Matagalpa.  We arrived late in the afternoon at our final hotel of the trip, which had air conditioning and a pool!

We went out to dinner, and on our walk back we came upon a procession for Holy Thursday.  A huge crowd was gathered to hear the story of Jesus’s last day.  Some participants were dressed as Roman soldiers and one as Jesus, and they acted out the story as it was read aloud.

We had begun our day with a goodbye, and another goodbye was on our minds as we went to bed on this final night in Nicaragua.  Our trip, begun so recently, was drawing to a close.  But we still had 24 hours until our flight, and we had confidence that Ernesto would have more adventures in store for us during that time.

Sage & Moses