Two months ago I returned home from San Juan del Sur, a small town on the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua. I brought home some cheap souvenirs, a camera full of photos, a fantastic tan and a profound appreciation for just how good we have it here.
For a little more than a week, five other South students and I worked and lived completely immersed in this new, strange world. At first I was unable to process everything I experienced.
We stayed in groups of three with host families, who provided us with daily meals and a place to sleep. During the day we would ride in the back of a pickup truck for hours along dirt roads to rural, one-room elementary schools. Many of the kids were shy at first, but they smiled when we made an effort to speak Spanish with them. We delivered pencils, notebooks and other supplies to the schools, taught a little English and played with the kids for a while, before packing up and setting off for another school.
By simply walking into the schools you could gain an immediate appreciation for how different public education is in a third-world country. The school buildings themselves were simple, exposed structures with metal grates for windows and no air conditioning. The kids were seated in small, uncomfortable-looking seats; in some schools there weren’t enough to go around.
The schools weren’t arranged according to a grade system, so there was a wide age range within most of the classes. Because so many younger children were mixed in with older ones, the teachers were limited considerably in terms of what could be done in class.
Despite the tragic condition of the schools, the kids seemed content. Even though they lacked so many of the basic resources that we take for granted, they were happy just to be in school, to at least be given an opportunity to learn.
Whenever I hear somebody complain about how much school sucks, or how stressed they are about college, I think back to these kids who will probably never come close to getting the same opportunities that we do in Newton.
One day, our group visited the local high school. It was a larger building than the elementary schools, but it still clearly lacked so many of the resources necessary to teach students at a high school level.
We sat in on an English class and tried to have conversations with small groups of students, most of whom were around our age. I sat down in a group of about seven other teenagers. For a while we just stared, tried to say something, gave up and laughed, everyone acknowledging the mutual awkwardness.
We grew more comfortable by the end. We talked about what we do for fun outside of school. We talked about baseball, which as I discovered is something of a national obsession in Nicaragua. We talked about our families, and what we want to do once we finish school. We talked about music, and I was surprised to learn how popular Lady Gaga is among Nicaraguan youth.
Overall, we discovered many more similarities than differences. These were people just like me. The language barrier was the only thing preventing us from having a really normal conversation, and afterwards I regretted not trying to take more risks with my own speaking.
During the course of our conversations, I remember somebody asked me what I thought about my own school. Trying to be funny, I told them how boring I thought some of my classes were.
I don’t think they got the joke.
Even if they didn’t like going to school, I think everybody in my group that day understood and appreciated how significant it was to have a high school education. I felt guilty afterwards. To these people, school isn’t just some place to hand in homework and take tests. It represents an opportunity, perhaps one of the few opportunities they will have to get ahead in life.
Even though within our own community there are people from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, I’m sure I can safely say that most of us are going to have more opportunities to achieve in our lives than the kids I spoke with in San Juan del Sur will.
Looking out from the back of a pickup truck as we drove from school to school, I was able to observe the harsh realities faced by people in developing nations. As we passed, people waved at us from the porches of tiny shacks. Starving cows and dogs turned their heads as we approached, and mournfully turned away as we drove by.
According to the World Bank, more than 80 percent of the world lives on less than $10 a day. More than a billion people worldwide don’t have access to clean water, and more then 2.5 billion people don’t have basic sanitation.
I arrived home last month during the water contamination emergency. For a week, I couldn’t have a conversation without somebody complaining about having to buy bottles or boil tap water. In Nicaragua, people can’t even brush their teeth with the water because of the risk of infection from water-borne parasites.
I’m happy to be back. I’m glad the most I have to worry about this week is preparing for finals, and not whether there will be food at home. I really believe my trip to Nicaragua altered my perspective. It’s easy to dismiss problems from another part of the world when they are presented to you as statistics. When you are right there, when you can look somebody in the face and know their pain, that’s when it becomes real.
