Category: El Testimonio
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Learning, and losing (at the most inconvenient times), your Spanish
In Nicaragua, Michelle and I lived way up north, near Honduras. Managua, the country’s capital, is in the south, and a long way away, especially for hitchhikers. That’s how everyone got around: standing on the shoulder, sticking out a finger (not your thumb–in Nicaragua, you point to where you want to go), waiting for a…
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My First Look Down the Barrel
Dear Reader: I’ve been writing about my life in Nicaragua during the Sandinista-Contra war. This is from the archives. It’s one essay of a four-part series on guns, which can be found on The Writing Bull. The man was drunk. He had reason to be. The enemy had come through his small town in northern…
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Weed Out the Gringos
Before we moved into the Nicaraguan war zone, the group we were with, Witness for Peace, trained us for our jobs, which was, put simply, to get in the way of Reagan’s illegal Contra army. Wherever there were gringos, the Contra didn’t attack. That would make for bad press: If Ronald’s boys ended up killing…
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Through These Words, I Rise
In order to rescatar mi lengua (rescue my language) from an anti-Spanish childhood (my white father had ordered Mamá not to speak to me in her native language when I was a child), I studied like a fiend. Every night, before moving to Nicaragua in 1985, I memorized thirty Spanish words a day. Before getting on the…
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Nicaragua Was Not My First War
In 1969, when I was seven, we made a trip to El Salvador for the summer. My parents had plans: they considered moving to my mother’s home country, for financial reasons. Life was cheaper in Central America, even for a financially strapped gringo family. Mamá still had kin in the country. We could build a…