I write to you now from Matagalpa, the closest thing I have to a “home base” here in Nicaragua. I'm sitting in my favorite little corner of the city, Artesanos, sipping Chamomile tea, and enjoying the cool mountain breezes that gently sweep through this open air café.
Leaving Bluefields was a tremendously emotional transition for me. Working with a well-established organization like Acción Médica allowed me to hit the ground running with my projects in a way that I hadn't been able to in previous volunteer situations. I became so emotionally invested, especially in the prison project, that I had a very hard time leaving behind that which was only getting started.
On my last day at the prison, I brought each of the young men a hard-bound journal, inscribed with a personal message of encouragement from me, a copy of William Ernest Henly's INVICTUS (translated, of course), and a long list of ideas to get them started writing (Write about your happiest memory...Write about what you want your life to look like when you leave prison...etc.). We sat around in a circle at the end of our meeting, with José Ramón strumming away on my guitar, asking over and over, “Can't we just sing one more song?” They got me pretty choked up when they told me how much it meant to them to have someone come visit them every week, and take a real interest in their lives.
Through tears, one of the teens handed me his handkerchief and said, “Take this, to remember me.” I was really touched, and then taken off guard when he followed up by saying, “Can I keep your ring to remember YOU?” Now, it isn't a fancy ring, but it was a gift from my mom, and therefore pretty sentimental to me. While searching for a response, I stuck my hand in my pocket to find my own handkerchief to nervously wipe my brow. Right before I wiped, the obvious response came to me: “Here, buddy. Take my handkerchief to remember me!” One sweaty red handkerchief traded for a sweaty purple handkerchief. I don't think that was exactly how he hoped the exchange would pan out, but it's the thought that counts, right?
Leaving the theatre group was emotional in an entirely different way. It was no small thing, taking on the challenge of forming group of teenagers with no theatrical experience into a performance-ready theatre troupe in less than 5 weeks. Together, we learned basic theatre skills, wrote a one act play, rehearsed and polished it, and performed it for an audience of over 130 people on my last night in Bluefields. The credit for such a success goes to the willingness of the teens to try new things, their natural talent for storytelling, and their commitment to excellence in the final product. In the end, they were a smash success with the audience, and left the stage beaming with pride in their accomplishment.
The sub-plot to the theatre story was the relationship between my co-teacher Jenny and I. You’ll recall from a previous blog entry, that in a frustrated moment several weeks back, I accidentally called Jenny a jackass, when I meant to call her stubborn. (We were playing a warm-up game, and Jenny kept disagreeing with the group about when she was “out,” and I got frustrated after the third or fourth disagreement. I got the words for “donkey” and “stubborn” confused...Damn second language!) Though I apologized up and down for my error, I can now pinpoint that as the moment that our different ideas about how the group should work began to clash visibly.
Our clashes were rooted in cultural difference. Nicaraguan society is much more hierarchical than our culture in the US. For example, in an office in the US, you are much more likely to see the boss and all of her employees sitting around one table, sharing ideas equally, and addressing each other by first name. In Nicaragua, on the other hand, people are much more likely to sit and listen to the boss, only responding when he calls on them, and they probably refer to him by his title, like “Doctor.”
This cultural difference found it's way into our theatre classroom quite quickly. Everything I've ever learned about theatre is all about group participation and individual empowerment. It's stifling to be in an environment with a dictator for a director. So when I stepped into the classroom as a teacher for the first time, I did everything I could to make it an egalitarian place. “This is YOUR theatre group,” I would tell them. “What do you want this group to look like? What are your expectations? What are your desired outcomes?” I usually answered their questions by asking questions. Whenever I was asked, “How should we do this?”, I tried to respond with, “What are your options? Which do you like better? What are the advantages/disadvantages of each?” I'm sure that I wasn't 100% consistent in this approach, but I did the best that I could to create that kind of empowering environment.
It wasn't easy to teach that way, in a culture that is so inherently hierarchical. I was working against the cultural sensibility that the teacher knows best and everyone should wait around and see what he has to say before making a move. I think my teaching style was most unsettling to Jenny, my co-teacher, who was so used to being in front of a classroom and being fully in control of the class' progression. I'm sure it was equally unnerving for her to have a foreigner come in and start up a class in a subject in which she had no experience or training, and then be expected to take over the class once the foreigner left.
I failed to recognize or understand Jenny's uncertainties until too late. Being a short-term volunteer, and very conscious of my place within the office hierarchy, I felt uncomfortable openly addressing the differences between our approaches, fearing that Jenny might view any such conversation as an attack on her personal teaching style. This was foolish of me. I should have sat down with Jenny at the beginning, explained my approach, and said, “This is just my way of doing things. Feel free to change it when I leave, but maybe for the next few weeks you could be my partner in this, and maybe we can learn something from each other.” Maybe that would have helped. Maybe not. You know what they say about hindsight...
One of the prime examples of our different approaches came late one Wednesday afternoon, as we were preparing for that evening's HIV support group meeting. Our site director, Jeannette, came into the office and suggested that we put together a short little skit about the stigmas that persons living with HIV have to face, and then present it to the group that evening. One of the group members was there at the time---a very outgoing young woman, who is the only member of the group who is publicly open about her HIV status---and I suggested that maybe she (let's call her Rosario for the moment) should be the star of the skit. Jenny's mouth dropped and her head started shaking, like I had said something terribly offensive.
“No, Kendal. You don't understand. She can't be part of the skit.”
“Why not, Jenny?” I said. “She's a member of the group.”
“Yes, but how can she visualize the stigmatization of HIV positive persons if she's in the skit?”
“Well Jenny, don't you think that, as a person living with HIV, Rosario understands those stigmas far better than you or I ever could?”
“The thing is,” said Jenny, “we have to SHOW THEM what that stigma is, and Rosario can't benefit from our presentation if she has to be in it.”
It's all about different cultural ideas. I know this. I kept telling myself this. But it still frustrated me.
We had a similar problem when we started writing our one act play. The story was about a young girl who contracted HIV from a one-night-stand, and then had to tell her family and friends her status, and ask for their support.
We made a habit of moving the roles around every day, so that each person could have a chance to act each part. It also helped us be more flexible if one or more of the actors didn't make it to practice. Instead of two friends, there could just be one. And instead of having a mother, father, and siblings, we could get by with the young girl only having a mother for the day.
The downside (or maybe the upside?) of having so many people cycling in and out of the different roles, is that everyone formed very strong opinions about how each role should be played. When you create an egalitarian learning environment, people tend to feel comfortable offering their opinions freely---be they positive or negative. I challenged people to keep their criticisms constructive, to varying degrees of success. I had the hardest time communicating this to Jenny. She was prone to vehemently tell students when she thought they weren't doing the parts “right,” and would jump in to show the students just how it “should” be done.
It got to the point that the students thought that Jenny was the only one who could play the main character “correctly,” and so when we presented a preview of our progress to the office staff a few weeks in, the teens insisted that Jenny take the lead role. I had told the students that this was their theatre group, after all, so I
decided to sit back and see how it panned out.
Jenny was great. She has a real flair for the dramatic, and could be a really sensational professional actress. The first presentation was well received, but Jeanette pointed out that she would have liked to have seen one of the teens take the lead, instead of Jenny. This comment was a God-send, saving me from having to single Jenny out on my own. After the presentation, we sat around and debriefed for a few minutes. I sat there in silence as the teens discussed and agreed that they could learn a lot from Jenny, but that it would be better if she didn't play the main parts anymore. Everything seemed to be working out.
Over the next few weeks, we expanded the story to a full one act length---about one full hour. The roles got a little more complex, the story became more interesting, and we set a date for our first public performance. There was an uneasy peace between Jenny, the students, and I. If Jenny was upset about being asked to play a more supportive role, she certainly didn't show it directly. But she stopped participating in rehearsals almost entirely. I continued to invite her to participate, asking her opinion, but got limited response. I didn't get worked up about it...in fact, I was honestly glad to have a little space to do things my way for a little while, without coming into conflicts over teaching style.
Over those next few weeks, our biggest challenge was learning not to laugh during serious scenes. We were quite the giggly group, and theatre should be fun, so I was stuck finding a balance between keeping discipline and maintaining a positive work environment. One afternoon, we just couldn't get ourselves to stop laughing, so I had everyone lay on the floor on their bellies, and I turned out the lights (a trick I learned from a dear friend who teaches drama). In the dark, I talked about how it was our responsibility to honor the struggles and the lives of those people who live with HIV. I told them that there would be HIV positive people in the audience on the night of our performance, and that out of respect for them, we had to be as truthful as possible to the real-life experience of contracting the virus. I finished by saying that we also had a responsibility to those who work with HIV positive people, like Jenny, who have lost friends to the virus, and who have helped people cope through some of the darkest hours of their lives.
That chat was a turning point. From then on, whenever we got giggly, I just had to say, “Remember who we are honoring,” and things settled down.
In the week before the big performance, I was impressed to see how much ownership the students took in the process. Though I thought that they were ready to perform, they were still pretty nervous, and they asked if we could rehearse every day, instead of just twice that week. They brought in their own warm-ups and theatre games that they had found on the Internet. Jenny's son became ill, and so she was unable to meet with us for most of the week. For this reason, and because she hadn't been participating much in rehearsals anyway, we didn't give her a role in the final performance. (I should mention that I played only a directorial role the whole time...I never acted in any of the scenes.)
The other challenge in the final week was that one of the actors dropped out of the group, due to a family crisis. He had been playing the father of the girl with HIV, and so we turned over his lines and responsibilities to the young lady who had been playing the mother, turning her relatively small role into a much larger one. She rose to the challenge, but struggled with some of the complexities of the role. In the play, when the young girl tells her family that she has contracted HIV, the parents kick her out of the house, because they don't understand the virus or how it is transmitted. The girl's friends take her in, and together they seek the support of a community health promoter (from our organization) to help her gain the support of her family, and reconcile the relationship. In then end, the girl moves back in with her now-supportive family, and all is well.
The challenge of playing the parents in this situation, is how to kick your own kid out of the house at a time of great need, and then later have the audience feel good about the fact that the girl is moving back in. Basically, the parents can't be mean about it, but have to justify throwing her out by revealing their fears about the virus. The main idea was, “Honey, we love you, but we can't have you living here and risk you infecting the rest of the family.” This approach gave the health promoter the opportunity to explain how the virus is transmitted, and help the parents feel comfortable inviting the girl back home.
When the young lady playing the mother had to take over the responsibilities of the father as well, I recruited Jenny's help in working through the details of this role with her. Towards the end of the week, the young actress was finally comfortable in her role—or at least she told me that she was. Things were going smoothly.
That is, until we got to the day of the performance. What had started out as simply a presentation by the theatre group, had suddenly morphed into a full-fledged community activity for the whole organization, complete with a thirty-minute spiritual devotional, a PowerPoint presentation on HIV, testimonials by people living with the virus, and a candle-lighting ceremony. Somehow, I missed the memo on this, until I was handed a schedule the morning of the performance. I was also told that we were going to need to cut the length of the play in half, since there were so many other activities planned, and people might get bored. Oh, and by the way, we think the teens should sing a song after they perform the play.
Another example of cultural difference. I'm used to having my ducks in a row for a presentation, long before the day of. I like to know what's happening...and my worst nightmare is standing in front of an audience without knowing what's coming next. So you can imagine that these last-minute changes threw me into an inner tailspin. I think I did a good job of not showing my frustration, especially over the fact that the activity had been planned around our play, and now we were being asked to cut it in half to make room for 30 minutes of hymn singing. I smiled and said, “No problem,” without any real plans to change anything, knowing that the teens would probably rush through the play on account of their nerves, anyway.
That morning, we ran through the play once, polishing up the final details. I couldn't have been more proud. I thought to myself, “If they do half as well this afternoon, they'll have so much to be proud of.” We agreed to meet at the auditorium (the multi-purpose room of the local convent) at 1:30pm, cleaned up, and ready to go.
I didn't really expect them to be on time. After all, we are in Nicaragua. But actually, most of them showed up early, eager to see the stage, and walk through the motions a couple of times before the audience came at 3:00pm. I called up my boss, Jeanette, and asked her if we could move the furniture around in the room, especially the big podium sitting in the middle of the stage. We had most of the actors there, and so after moving the podium, we walked through the show, step by step.
It was 2:45 before Jenny showed up. I was relieved that I hadn't assigned her any responsibilities, because she was over an hour late, and hadn't had the opportunity to walk through the staging with us. We were about three-quarters of a way through our walk-through when she walked in, right onto the stage, and said, “You can't move that podium like that, because we need it there for the testimonials and presentations.”
You might imagine that, fifteen minutes before the audience arrived, such a comment wasn't really appreciated, especially from someone who had arrived over an hour late. I admit, my tone was inappropriately sharp when I replied, “Jenny, we'll move it back in place before and after the play. Now if you don't mind, we need to keep working.”
I saw out of the corner of my eye that my tone had offended her. I knew better, but didn't take the time to rectify the situation, feeling the pressure of the audience I imagined to be pressing on the doors from the outside. “I'll apologize later,” I thought.
The activity started 45 minutes late, as is pretty standard in this country. The teens and I gathered in the back of the room as our turn came around, just after the 30 minutes of hymns and 40 minutes of PowerPoint presentations. I simply told them that I was proud of them, and then listened as each one of them offered encouragement to the others. It was really something to see just how far they'd come in four weeks, and I bowed my head in quiet pride as one of the teens asked if he could pray for the performance. They were ready. We were all ready.
When the time came, I went to the back of the room to run the “light board,” (a.k.a. the light switch by the door), flicking off the lights so that the actors could get into their places. When the lights came back on, the murmuring crowd feel silent, and my jaw dropped.
Jenny was sitting on the stage, in the chair usually occupied by the role of the mother. Jeannette leaned over to me and said, “I didn't know that Jenny was going to be in the play.”
I replied, “Neither did I.”
The next forty-five minutes are still painful to remember, even three weeks after the fact. Jenny took over the role of the mother, sidelining the girl who had been rehearsing the role, making her into a mute “sister” that sat wordless at her mother's side. The girl who had been rehearsing the real role of the sister was even more confused, and kept looking at her boyfriend in the audience, shrugging and giggling nervously. When it came time for the main character to tell her mother that she had contracted HIV, the girl couldn't even get the words out, because Jenny kept cracking joke after joke, making all the actors laugh on stage, and keeping the audience at a dull roar. The most crucial moment of the scene went something like this:
“Mom, I have to tell you something.”
“Well, spit it out. I'm freaking tired and I don't have time to listen to your pathetic complaining.”
“The thing is, well, um...Mom...”
“Hurry up! Rub my feet while you're at it. I've had a long day.”
“Mom, it isn't easy to tell you.”
“What? Are you pregnant? I told you had to stop hanging out with those horrible friends of yours! This is just AWFUL! I can't believe my own daughter...”
(Lots of audience laughter and giggling actors.)
“No mom, I'm not pregnant. I have HIV.”
“WHAT? GET OUT OF MY HOUSE! You disgust me! Don't come near my daughters. You are such a slut for getting that disease. I can't believe you! Don't touch me! Get out of here!”
(Uproarious laughter from actors and audience alike.)
And so it went, on and on, with Jenny sacrificing the script that we had written to get cheap and easy laughs from the audience. It's hard to describe how I felt as I helplessly flicked the light switch on and off in the back of the room. Betrayed, would be a good start. Hijacked. Blindsided. Confused. Crushed. Pissed as hell.
By the time it was all over, Jenny was on her knees, center stage, beating her breast and clutching her daughter's knees, begging forgiveness for the fool she had been. You'd have thought she was playing Lady Macbeth. The audience ate it up. They laughed so hard, they could barely stay in their seats when the lights went up for curtain call. The laughter burned in my ears.
How could Jenny do something like that, after all the time we had spent talking about how complex the relationship between the daughter and her parents needed to be? How could she take over one of the teens' roles, especially without telling anyone? (Or rather, without telling me? Who knows, maybe the other teens were in on it, too.) How could she turn the whole play into a giant JOKE, after all the conversations we had had about the fact that we were honoring the lives of people living with the virus? After I had said that we were honoring JENNY, and all the work she has done with HIV!!! I couldn't look at the faces of the HIV positive folks sitting in the audience, feeling like the whole play had become a mockery of their real-life experiences. How selfish and infantile must a person be, to sabotage five weeks of rehearsal just to make a point? Or rather, to put oneself in the spotlight, no matter whom must be trampled to get there?
I should also mention that we had hired a videographer to film the event. Unfortunately, we forgot to tell him that it is inappropriate to stand on the stage in between the actors and the audience. While Jenny was busy becoming Mama Rose, our friend the cameraman stuck his massive equipment two inches away from the actors' faces, blocking the audience's view, and making each of the teens squirm and send sideways glances at the lens every few seconds.
It was all too much to handle. I have never felt so betrayed in my life. And as I tried to breathe deeply and regain my composure, Jenny grabbed the microphone and sweetly said, “We'd like to invite up the guy who made all of this possible...Our director, our teacher, our friend....Kendal!”
Can you imagine the effort it took to plaster a smile on my face in that moment? To accept Jenny's hug, and graciously accept the beautiful gift that the teens had purchased for me? I did the best I could, but when someone tried to put the microphone in my hand, I just couldn't keep it together any longer. I declined, and made a bee-line for the back door. I prayed that I wouldn't run into anyone as I rushed through the long corridors of the convent and out into the high-walled garden.
As I collapsed onto a stone bench, hot tears of anger and betrayal gushed down my face. I couldn't pinpoint if I was more hurt by the fact that my role as director had been so blatantly disrespected, or that the hard work of each of the teens had been so rapidly undermined by the selfish motivations of someone's over-sized ego. It didn't matter, really. The damage was done, and I was leaving town the next day.
I sat there in that garden for the next forty minutes, while Rosario's amplified testimony drifted overhead, mingled with the slow, haunting chants of the nuns in their cloisters. Gradually, I pulled myself together, knowing that I needed to put on a good face for the audience inside, and the teenagers who had worked so hard, and had achieved so much, despite the present circumstances.
When I walked back in, one of the teens noted my red eyes and said, “I know you're sad about leaving us tomorrow. But we're going to be okay. We've gotten off to a great start, and we're going to keep going after you leave.” He didn't know the real reason why I had been upset, but his words reassured me that my work in Bluefields hadn't been in vain.
As the audience filed out, I just smiled as people congratulated me on what a success the play had been. If any of the teens were upset about Jenny's stunt, they sure didn't show it. I think they had been so nervous beforehand, and were just so pleased that the audience enjoyed the final product...they simply forgot how the play was intended to be performed. The office staff was especially enthusiastic. They were so impressed by what we had pulled off in just a few weeks. I avoided Jenny's eyes, not trusting what might come out of my mouth if we spoke at all. I felt so alone in that moment—each and every compliment adding to my frustration that no one knew how the play was supposed to be. Yes, the play had been funny, and Jenny had made people laugh a lot. But I didn't care how GOOD the play was...I cared about the ownership that each student felt in the process.
As the last few people drifted out of the auditorium, the teens asked me if we could play a couple of our warm-up games, just one more time, before I left. So we sat in a circle, making silly faces and laughing our way through the quagmire of pride mixed with the impending bite of separation that we were each feeling in our own individual ways. I have to admit that they really helped me shake off my profound sense of betrayal, reassuring me that the foundation that we had laid was strong, and that the group would continue, at least for the next little while.
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The next morning, I woke up at 5:00am in a complete daze, not sure if it had all been a really bad dream or not. I quickly packed my bags, and hopped on a plane to the Corn Islands—two little tropical paradises off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. I had originally planned to be there only a few days...After all, what's there to do on an island that isn't even a square mile? But after the trauma of that final day in Bluefields, being on a remote island, laying on a sandy beach and sipping a piña colada, was exactly the therapy I needed.
I ended up staying on the islands for 12 days...most of which I spent on Little Corn Island, learning to scuba dive and getting really tan. By the time I got back to Bluefields to pick up my extra suitcase, I had cooled down enough to put the performance incident behind me. I wasn't yet ready to talk through my feelings with the involved parties, but I wasn't sure what good that would do anyway, as I probably won't ever see them again.
After two days traveling by steamboat, speedboat, and several buses, I finally arrived in my beloved Matagalpa a week ago on Friday night, and collapsed into the welcoming embrace of dear friends, cool mountain breezes, and a friend's soft couch. I know that I'll continue reflecting on these experiences for some time to come. I keep reminding myself that my final day in Bluefields was the exception to the rule—that I have learned so much from my six weeks there, and will continue to learn from those experiences in future work.
But for the moment, I'm just glad to be back in the closest thing I have to a home in Nicaragua.
