Eyewitness reports from the campo , of the war:
We arrived in the village of Limay several hours after the aerial bombing of its military base . A witness, Maria, age 12, reported that she and her sister Lucia-Ana, age 14, had gone to the base to sell pastries. They saw a strange plane in the sky that could fly forward and backward. They knew that it was the Americans and they ran. Artillery was fired. “We are killed!” Maria remembers screaming. Her sister was struck by shrapnel and died instantly, but Maria hid safely behind a low wall. Later, their father and brothers retrieved Lucia-Ana’s body parts with a shovel. A Roots of Justice volunteer returned to continue searching when it was discovered that some parts were missing.
As protection, Juliet thinks: It is happening far away from here, it is happening to people who don’t look like me. The real Nicaraguan children at school seem impervious to its happening, may not even know that it is — like the foot of a body that does not know its hand has been cut wide open.
“There you are, Juliet. Keith is looking for you. Go and play and stay outside. Emmanuel’s finally down for a nap.”
Their street is paved, the yards fenced with metal bars standing in poured concrete, but behind theirs are many more streets, of pocked dirt, along which smaller houses of wood and tin crowd to the foot of the hill. Juliet and Keith follow an ox cart around the corner, stepping over patties of steaming fresh dung.
They enter a tiny tienda stuffed into the front room of someone’s house. Keith has enough for a packet of Chiclets, which they open and share. They examine the shelves in the middle of the room: nothing but jam. Jam is rare. Juliet picks up a jar to read the label, but the words are neither English nor Spanish: an alphabet composed of ordinary letters mixed with backwards R ’s and N ’s and upside-down V ’s and too few vowels.
“Cherry?” She squints at the picture, but they don’t have enough money to buy a jar.
The store owner rocks in a chair in the corner, breastfeeding a large toddler. Tongue against the roof of her mouth — tst, tst, tst — she shoos away the children crowding the door, who have followed Juliet and Keith in expectation of some light diversion.
The silhouette of Sandino, hero of a long-ago failed revolution, is spray-painted in black on the wall beside the front door, but that won’t help them find this store again: Sandino is everywhere in this neighbourhood. He wears a hat. Fifty years ago he was killed by assassination — a peasant who demanded more for the people of Nicaragua than the dictator was willing to give, a story known to poor nations everywhere. A few with all and most with nothing. The Sandinista government is rewriting the story by taking back from those with too much and sharing it out equally: farms, land, food, education.
In this neighbourhood, everyone is a Sandinista, even Juliet and Keith. But at school it is the opposite. No one is.
Mornings mean school, afternoons mean home. Mornings make Juliet’s stomach churn and turn, as though she’s coming down with the flu, which is always, miraculously, cured by the afternoon. It is like living two disconnected lives.
But then, so much in her every day is bifurcated, split down the middle, parts separated one from the other, never touching, with only herself the link between strange, opposing, untouchable solitudes. American; Sandinista. Rich; poor. Free; constrained. Admired; scorned. Befriended; alone.
Just after six o’clock in the morning, and already the sky is bright and swarming hot. Mingled aromas of hot plastic, rusted springs, and flowering trees pervade this new season as the bus wends its way through Managua’s better neighbourhoods, collecting Nicaraguan children born into wealth, children of foreign diplomats and of U.S. embassy employees. Juliet and Keith are the only children of peace workers. (Is that even a profession?)
Despite
We arrived in the village of Limay several hours after the aerial bombing of its military base . A witness, Maria, age 12, reported that she and her sister Lucia-Ana, age 14, had gone to the base to sell pastries. They saw a strange plane in the sky that could fly forward and backward. They knew that it was the Americans and they ran. Artillery was fired. “We are killed!” Maria remembers screaming. Her sister was struck by shrapnel and died instantly, but Maria hid safely behind a low wall. Later, their father and brothers retrieved Lucia-Ana’s body parts with a shovel. A Roots of Justice volunteer returned to continue searching when it was discovered that some parts were missing.
As protection, Juliet thinks: It is happening far away from here, it is happening to people who don’t look like me. The real Nicaraguan children at school seem impervious to its happening, may not even know that it is — like the foot of a body that does not know its hand has been cut wide open.
“There you are, Juliet. Keith is looking for you. Go and play and stay outside. Emmanuel’s finally down for a nap.”
Their street is paved, the yards fenced with metal bars standing in poured concrete, but behind theirs are many more streets, of pocked dirt, along which smaller houses of wood and tin crowd to the foot of the hill. Juliet and Keith follow an ox cart around the corner, stepping over patties of steaming fresh dung.
They enter a tiny tienda stuffed into the front room of someone’s house. Keith has enough for a packet of Chiclets, which they open and share. They examine the shelves in the middle of the room: nothing but jam. Jam is rare. Juliet picks up a jar to read the label, but the words are neither English nor Spanish: an alphabet composed of ordinary letters mixed with backwards R ’s and N ’s and upside-down V ’s and too few vowels.
“Cherry?” She squints at the picture, but they don’t have enough money to buy a jar.
The store owner rocks in a chair in the corner, breastfeeding a large toddler. Tongue against the roof of her mouth — tst, tst, tst — she shoos away the children crowding the door, who have followed Juliet and Keith in expectation of some light diversion.
The silhouette of Sandino, hero of a long-ago failed revolution, is spray-painted in black on the wall beside the front door, but that won’t help them find this store again: Sandino is everywhere in this neighbourhood. He wears a hat. Fifty years ago he was killed by assassination — a peasant who demanded more for the people of Nicaragua than the dictator was willing to give, a story known to poor nations everywhere. A few with all and most with nothing. The Sandinista government is rewriting the story by taking back from those with too much and sharing it out equally: farms, land, food, education.
In this neighbourhood, everyone is a Sandinista, even Juliet and Keith. But at school it is the opposite. No one is.
Mornings mean school, afternoons mean home. Mornings make Juliet’s stomach churn and turn, as though she’s coming down with the flu, which is always, miraculously, cured by the afternoon. It is like living two disconnected lives.
But then, so much in her every day is bifurcated, split down the middle, parts separated one from the other, never touching, with only herself the link between strange, opposing, untouchable solitudes. American; Sandinista. Rich; poor. Free; constrained. Admired; scorned. Befriended; alone.
Just after six o’clock in the morning, and already the sky is bright and swarming hot. Mingled aromas of hot plastic, rusted springs, and flowering trees pervade this new season as the bus wends its way through Managua’s better neighbourhoods, collecting Nicaraguan children born into wealth, children of foreign diplomats and of U.S. embassy employees. Juliet and Keith are the only children of peace workers. (Is that even a profession?)
Despite
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