Hotel Chepito, Managua, Nicaragua, November 16, 1987

“Where are you going next?” asked an American friend.

“Tomorrow we’re going to a settlement of displaced people north of Condega.”

“How are you getting there?”

“Hitch-hiking….”

My friend shakes his head in amazement. “You’ve got a cool old man.”

“And what do your folks think of Nicaragua?” I asked a group.

“Well, maybe if they found out where it is….”

“My father can’t believe that I support this government – or any government.”

My father’s attitude towards the Nicaraguan revolution was rare enough, let alone his willingness to come and “share the life of the people,” as he put it, which in practice meant living in “basic” accommodation, risking uncertain, crowded transportation, and eating what was available.

It also meant living a life at a level of adventure to which I have become accustomed, and which had a revitalizing and relaxing effect on him that was wonderful to see unfold. Two moments of exquisite happiness (my own) stand out for me:

Riding from Sebaco to Managua, standing up in the back of a large army truck, moving fast past fields of growing things, gigantic trees, distant mountains, then seeing Lake Managua and the volcanoes near its shores; and my very own Dad, standing tall, thick grey hair flattened by the wind, with his two-week-old beard (his first beard ever, and it looks good). My Dad, accustomed to a quiet routine life and watching himself grow older, was trying to decide whether seeing the country from the back of an army truck was better than, or only almost as good as, riding on top of a bus.

The next afternoon we were wading into the Pacific Ocean, his first time ever in a tropical sea. A big wave suddenly knocked us over, one on top of the other. He came up roaring with laughter, pure delight filling his face with the biggest grin I’ve ever seen. “Heather,” he roared, “I haven’t had so much fun in years!”

During the three weeks, our relationship grew and strengthened, partly because we were in a new environment and sharing a common purpose, and partly because our roles had reversed. I was now the one with the stronger language skills and savoir-faire, exercising responsibility and looking out for him. He was wide-eyed with wonder and learning to talk. The day that I realized that I had to take the heavier physical load as well, that he wasn’t my infinitely strong big daddy anymore, as I had been subconsciously assuming, I understood the extent of what was happening. I also had to experience “letting go” of him, as a parent of a child, to run an errand on his own or to show his photos from home using what Spanish he knew.

Mostly the role reversal allowed me to see him freshly: freer than I’d known him, open to new things, experiences, foods, with a new “Let’s see what’s around the next corner!” look on his face, the memory of which I treasure.

In many ways his visit took him back to his childhood in rural Nova Scotia, especially when we were in the countryside.

We visited two agricultural co-ops, both products of the agrarian reform.

The first was a cattle-raising operation with thirty members and their families near Nandaime, south of Managua. Before they got their land 2 1/2 years ago, most of them were landless labourers living in a community 18 km from the nearest road, with little prospect for improving themselves. With a strong organization and encouraged by the older generation, they moved everything they owned, even dismantling their houses (which in Canada would be called shacks) board by board to their new land. (The previous owner had fled the country when the revolution triumphed in 1979.)

They still swap stories about the move – how they hauled everything by ox-cart the 18 km to the road and from there in borrowed trucks, and of their arrival at night and in the rain, where they faced a huge pile of boards that were their various houses, and children and chickens that needed to be sheltered and fed.

Two and a half years later the co-op’s cattle herd stands at almost 700 and they have paid off their debts. Each family has two manzanas (1.4 hectares) to grow its basic foods: corn, rice, sorghum, beans. They plan to build a new brick house for each family; one man is going ahead on his own. The Popular Education Collectives operate all day Wednesdays, and almost everyone has achieved some level of literacy.

Understandably, they are strong supporters of the Sandinistas and the Revolution. “The campesino (peasant) isn’t marginalized anymore,” Porifirio told us as he was showing us the cattle. “This government cares that we learn to read, that we have land.” It was very moving to hear them speak of their cattle, their co-operative, their plans for the future, with pride and hope and confidence. It was a beautiful illustration of what profound social change can do for ordinary people.

For my father, the life of early-to-bed and up at 4 a.m., with pigs and chickens and bathing in the river, was evocative of his childhood. The housing conditions we saw and experienced reminded him of some in various Black and Native communities he has visited in Nova Scotia in the course of his Human Rights work, where children would be sleeping on the dirt floor or on old car seats.

More pictures of the co-op: