The River
The Yale undergraduate delegation spent a night out in Goyena last week, between two days of working with community members on painting the new preschool. In the evening, some of the young people in the community took them on a walk to the river that runs through it. The line of people walking, Nicaraguans and Americans, grew long and scattered as their paces and conversations broke them into groups of threes and fours.
People were hot and tired after a day of painting and bilingual conversations in the dusty heat of the dry season… not too tired to take advantage of the shallow river, though; plastic flip-flops and sneakers alike were abandoned on the bank as the entire gang waded in. The Nicaraguans showed the Americans a small spring just upstream. Some people practiced handstands, others their water-squirting techniques.
It took me forever to get them all out of the water and on their way back to Nueva Vida for dinner — it grew dark, and we squelched back to dinner by the light of the half-moon. I looked back at the group, again stretched into a long lazy line of Nicaraguans and Americans, and couldn’t tell who was who. I could pick up pieces of a Spanish-English lesson going on from a couple folks, but mostly I just heard laughter.
Anabel, 19, part of the leadership of Aristides Sanches, one of the sub-communities of Goyena, at the river.
Walking back from the river, though the fields by the light of the moon.
