What I learned in Nicaragua in 1980 how i came to teach English and Indigenous languages in Honduras

The Most Important Things I learned in Nicaragua in 1980 and How I came to Teach English and later Indigenous languages in Honduras.

 

By Wendy Griffin 6/18/2015

 

My abosolutely favorite sermón I Heard in Managua Nicaragua in the misas de gallo leading up to Christmas of 1980, the first year of the Sandista victory. It was given by the Papal Nuncio in achurch where the walls of the church had fallen down first in the earthquake that destroyed Managua and later they were rebuilt,but felldown in a minor earthquake and they asked the nuns who tended the church wouldn't it be better to leave it was because it let the breezes in? Any way he asked the Nicaraguan children and I who came to the misa de gallo (5am masses because that is when the rosters crow) how do we know Jesús Christ came to minister to the poor? 

 

Because he was born in a manger.  If his father had been rich, and said when he was approaching Bethlehem after hearing there was no room in the inns,  there is 100 dollars or dinari to the first person who will turn their children out of bed and give a bed to my pregant  wife who is in labor, do you think there would have been a bed made available for her?  Of course!  It was because he was born to a poor family that there was no room in the inn. Doesn't that ring totally true?

 

Later that week we did La Posada  in the church, where after being told that there was no room (no hay posada) in various homes, we go to the church and the doors are opened and the people are told In our church there is room for everyone and we all go in, including Mary, and Joseph who had not found posada ( aplace to rest) eleswhere on their journey that night. Garífuna posadas are substantially different.

 

A few years later I went to East Liberty Presbyterian Church which has a huge main church, but they decided to do the candlelight and carols service at 7 pm, the same time as La posada in Nicaragua, in their chapel, even though they have a 1,000 members in the church. I went and there was no room for me in the East Liberty Presbyterian church service in the chapel and I cried. I missed the humble Nicaraguans terribly who said in our church there is room for every one, and maybe we do not even need walls to keep anyone out.

 

I was also in Nicaragua at the time of the Sandinista Literacy Campaign in Indigenous Languages. Although it later went badly for them, it left me with the idea that it was posible and had many good reasons in its favor. I went on to study the Sandinista Literacy Campaign in Indigenous languages more in depth during my Master’s degree in Education at the University of Pittsburgh because i Heard of it while i was there. This is also how I first became interested in the Miskito Indians who I later worked with in Honduras and who I also studied their role in the Contra War at the University of Pittsburgh.

 

When I was in Nicaragua the people in Managua were happy the Somoza regime had been overthrown and that peace reigned in Nicaragua and the Army did not terrorize the local people. The worst complaint i Heard against the sandistas was the high Price of chicken which was not their fault since 60% of chickens were imported, mostly from the United States.

 

I was very sad the US government used my work in Nicaragua to justify supporting the Contras, and even more angry when I learned the relationship of drugs and the Iran-Contra Affair. When the opportunity came up to work in Honduras teaching English, a program started as part of the foreign aid the US government gave to Honduras to bribe them to let the Contras stay in Honduras (Nicaragua Libre was in the Honduran Department of El Paraiso and not in Nicaragua and displaced internally Honduran peasants who came to speak at the University), I accepted it saying, I will try to make sure that Honduras gets something good out of what was recognizably a bad situation. The Foreign Language major at the National Teacher’s College remains and is its largest major, a whole new building was built to house all the students. My 30 years of working in Honduras was partially trying to do penance or in some small way make up  for all the evil that was done as a result of my work in Nicaragua on the eve of Ronald Reagon coming into office and my government’s work in Central America during this period.

 

During my working at the US Embassy in Managua, and later working for USIS in Honduras i had the opportunity to observe other people who worked at the US Embassy. I had briefly thought that with degrees in Area Studies and having studied foreign languages I might be a good candidate to work in the foreign service, in the US Embassies abroad. But in Honduras i was told by the employees that the job of the employees of the US Embassy was to represent the government of the United States and not to try to meet the needs of local people. A US Ambassador to Honduras John Ferch was recalled after a short time in Honduras because he tried to represent Honduras’s needs instead of the US government’s policies. I felt given what i had seen of US foreign policy in Managua and Tegucigalpa, I was not cut out to work for the diplomatic service. I also thought that since I had studied Area studies, and foreign languages and had an Associate Degree in Business administration, I could work in international business, which however it turned out that I had no taste for either.

 

By the time I got out of the US Air Force in August of 1981, I had the idea that I did not want to be another suburban housewife, that instead my calling was to work with the poor in Central America, whom I had seen in Guatemala during the time of the masacres of the Maya Indians, and in Managua, but I did not know what type of help the poor needed or what type of training I needed to get to be able to be of real use for them.   So I chose to go to Asia and work in work camps (I worked among the Tamils of Sri Lanka about 3 months before the 27 year civil war broke out), and teaching English for the YMCA, and observe what kind of projects people were doing with the poor in Asia that I could learn the skills to do.

 

I tell the story that I was called to be an English teacher in the rainforest. I worked for the Tamils in Mylanthanie (Place of the Peacock) where the Tamils fought to keep elephants out of their rice paddies and the teachers only had 4th grade educations. But I had developed a cough from going from the heat of Agra where the Taj Mahal is, to Srinigar in the Himalayan mountains and visiting the glaciers, so I was in Batticoloa on the Coast which had a Christian church, i don’t remember if Catholic or Anglican, but i think  Catholic. I went into the church, and fell asleep in the pew. When i woke up I had an overwhelming sensation that I needed to go and check my mail. I received mail at the American Express office  in Colombo an all night train ride, but I had time before i had to go back to Mylanthanie, so I went and caught the train.

 

I had written to the YMCA Overservice Board that if they were looking for someone between 20 and 30 years old, of Christian orientation, who was interested in foriegn languages and cultures to teach English in Taiwan or Japan, they were looking for me. In Colombo there was a telegram saying expecting you in Taipei on Friday for orientation.

 

This put me in a quandry as I was supposed to supervise teachers for the Gandyam Society in Sri Lanka, an unpaid job, for another two months, but the Taiwan job was a paid job. I had studied East Asian studies at Western Washington State College, and it would be great to work and learn in Taiwan. Also it is not posible to get from Colombo on Tuesday, get a visa for taiwan in Hongkong, a flight there and a twoday process, and turn in my resignation in Mylanthanie where i had left all my things. But i wrote back, I will be in Taipei on Saturday. I went back to Mylanthanie and got my things, and turned around and flew to Hong Kong, got my two month extendable B visa, and flew to Taipei. When i got to Taipei they said, We were not expecting you,but since you are here, you can teach English at the Kaohisung YMCA where I worked for a year. While i was there, the head of all YMCA programs in Asia came to lunch, and I asked him if he knew anything about teaching in Thailand. He said he had just come from Thailand, and they were asking for an English teaching volunteer, if i was interested he could arrange it. So I taught English for two years in Asia, and observed projects being done as development.

 

I was talking to the Presbyterian missionary who went to the Interdenominational English speaking church in Kaohsiung about my quandry about how i did not know what kind of work was useful for me to do to help local people. He said maybe you are called to teach English, what you are doing. In Thailand I was over my head as i had to do teacher training, curriculum development, textbook writing, in addition to teaching my own classes. While overseas i learned what most people asked for for overseas English teachers was  a Master’s degree and 2 years experience. I had the two years of experience but i did not have the Master’s degree.

 

I flew back to my home town of Pittsburgh, PA at Thanksgiving and happened to see that the University of Pittsburgh offered a combined International Development Education Program (IDEP)/TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of other languages). I interviewed and submitted papers and was accepted to start in January 1985.   Unfortunately I did not like the program. The good TESOL professors  who had made the department famous were all in administrative positions and my teacher had less experience than i did.  The IDEP program was too theoretical for what i wanted to do. I got out my little Whole World handbook Guide to Work Study and Travel around the World put out by CIEE, and looked what they had in Latin America. They had the USIS English teacher training program, so I applied to that and transferred back to Western Washington State College for the summer where i took a Writing course that influenced my decisión to write for Honduras This Week.

 

Because USIS is on the East Coast they called me at 7 am, and asked if I wanted to start the first English teacher training program in Honduras? My dream job and I was not even 30 years old yet.  I accepted and later  I had to callthem back to ask how much it paid. I was told I had to be there before Thanksgiving,and that i show i began teaching at the National Teacher’s College in Tegucigalpa,Honduras. Since they had an extensión Project to help the Pech Indians get bilingual intercultural education I got involved with that, and 30 years later I am still trying to help that Project. 

 

When I was in Honduras last year, the Catholic Church had an article on Ignacio Loyola, the founder the Jesuits, that originally he was a soldier but when he became wounded he became a priest and started the largest order within the Catholic Church. Hopefully the Central Americans will judge me by what I have done voluntarily to help them, instead of what happened as a result of being a poor person who joined the military to get job experience, some training (I learned Spanish at the Defense language institute of monterey, California), and an income when I was por and desperate for an income and a place to live. My work in Honduras was a way to make up for the unfortunate way I got to know Central America and showed that not all Americans agree with the policies of their government in the área.

So if I say that current US policies in Central America especially Honduras are similar to what they were in the 1980's, I did not read what those policies were, I lived them then and now. And if I say the situation of how the Garífunas and to some extent the Miskitos are being treated now reminds me of what started the 27 Tamil civil war it was because i was there and lived those months with them.