Poet Carlos Rygbi and La Ventana Editor Juan Chow in Managua. flop of papers which he pitched on her desk, remarking sardonically, “Mds po- emas, y mas y mas." She didn’t quite know what to do with the Bridge of Poems. I assured her I was not a famous writer with a publishing house. “This is just like a poem. I am willing to see where it goes.” “It is beautiful, but who knows what it will mean for people. If it helps with peace, well. . . ” She shrugged and took me to meet the editors of La Ventana, the weekly cultural arm of the national Sandinista newspaper, Barricada. Franz Galich, originally from Guatemala, was the theater editor. He pursed his lips and questioned me. The next five hours turned into an interview in which we discussed Central and North American Indian cultural development. I described how the Navajos and Quilleutes were fighting for spiritual survival, sometimes with poetry. Afterwards, totally drained, I staggered into the Cultural Workers Coffee Shop and traded songs and opinions with the extravagant Bluefields poet, Carlos Rygbi, and the acerbic editor, Juan Chow. At last 1was meeting the nation of poets. 19. ACONVOYDISSOLVES 117 e Convoyistas spent our few days in f f Managua unloading, finishing repairs on trucks, and readying the great beasts for the pueblos awaiting them. Many of us still had the travel fever, wanting to regroup and keep heading south. “Tierra del Fuego awaits,” Bob Roughton said, “and I’ve never been there yet.” Doug Colter sat on a coach, slightly blue from the accident, his left leg in a cast. Tom Hansen, bravely working with broken ribs, almost cried during the evaluation session. “My dedication is to bring more convoys down to Nicaragua. Iwant to thank you all for helping m e . . . ” He choked up. They sat in silence, bruised survivors of Pedro’s crash, declared heroes by Ortega for their courage. I looked around at the rest of us, weary teachers, angry nurses, determined nuns and dazed priests, preachers ready to go home, homemakers ready to stay indefinitely. We didn’t look much like heroes. We looked like we had tried our best. The mechanics still did not rest, although they had obviously exhausted themselves. They came into the doss house our convoy had been given, greasy and pale from fatigue and illness. They were all vegetarians, ascetic and dedicated. Lucius Walker seemed tired, as if receiving a medal and national newspaper headlines were anti-climactic. We all seemed to share that sense of emptiness to some degree. “Hey,” said one of the travelers, “we risked our lives getting the stuff down here and we don’t get even a parade or a baseball game.” These folks are too busy to waste attention,” Jim Barnett said, “but I done what 1set out to do.”He came up to me as I struggled with some boxes. “I ain’t waiting for no medals. I just wanted to say this is one of the best groups of people I’ve ever worked with. If we had this kind of support in the South, the Civil Rights struggle would have been over a long time ago.” He smiled and .went to the airport alone. 20. GETTINGTOJALAPA The Last Kilometers Are the Hardest / n the morning we departed, joined by the Phoenix truck, driven by Mary Storey. Bob and I took Guillermo Diaz, father of a new Nicaraguan friend, with us. Like many in the middle class, Guillermo had sacrificed a great deal for the revolution. “See that river? It is red with topsoil like blood,” he told us. “Somoza started the deforestation. The Sandinistas haven’t stopped it. It’s my son and his wife who are excited. I’m just tranquil.” After a middle-aged divorce, Mary Storey had become a poverty lawyer, working with many refugee cases in Phoenix. Deciding to join the convoy, she had learned to drive. Mary lost things, like her money, her keys, her passport, but she never seemed to panic. The lost items would appear, magically, ten trucks away under an oil can. The pavement ended at Ocotal, and we drove up a track only recently cleared of Contras. Many of the bridges had been blown, and we went over narrow concrete strips with no extra tire purchase to spare. Sometimes we had to just gear it up and cross open streams. I drove the lead truck and when we came to a group of soldiers helping some women wash clothes in a milky river, we asked the way to Jalapa. They said, “Oh, about 20 kilometers ahead.” As we drove on, it became obvious we were lost. Guillermo discovered we had driven right through the town. The soldier probably thought we were mad. Anibal, Jalapa’s town secretary, jumped on our running board as we reentered the town. “Where are you coming from, Honduras?” “It’s hard to tell where the fields end and Jalapa begins.” “Si," he grinned quizically, “we’ll take care of that when the war is over. I knew you didn’t come from Honduras. That road has been closed for 10 years." He took us to the county motor pool, where Oso Ruidoso and the Phoenix truck became the only two trucks for tens of thousands of people to use. Guillermo Martinez, the mayor, and Angel, the one-armed mechanic who survived a Contra attack, got a thorough overview of the quirks of the vehicles, and we left to find our hospedaje. We had delivered. 21. ATTHEHARD SHRINE On our first night in town, we were invited to the house of the Director of Public Education, Sylvio Aguilar and his compahera, Miranda Collet. Originally from England, Miranda had taken the job of coordinating adult education. Efforts to raise the literacy rate had been one of several gold stars for the Sandinistas. I was eager to talk with them about something I understood. Pilgrims in Central America. Solid and dark, “sometimes mistaken for an Arab,” Sylvio had been born into the region’s poverty. He described work which mirrored his own struggle to gain experience and help people break free from the ignorance he felt to be the plague of Nicaragua. Miranda, tall and collected, continued: “People have been little more than serfs. They believe there are two kinds of human beings, those who order and those who serve. Our biggest job is convincing people that education is more than another arrogant demand of the ruling class.” Aguilar and Collet had almost nothing to work with; a few bicycles for the volunteer workers, some paper, pencils, chalk and blackboard paint. Students took months off from their studies to go to the far reaches of the province, risking their lives to teach at the edge of fields, in drying sheds, under tin-roofed kitchens. The mayor was a stern-faced man with a stable self-awareness. He had been an accountant before taking charge of development for the whole Jalapa Valley. His counterpart, the irrepressible and emotional Anibal, carried out many projects as town secretary. It was difficult to think of these pleasant men with semiautomatic rifles by their bedsides. The secretary before Anibal had been taken out into the street and shot by Contras before the people had driven them out of Jalapa. We made toasts after the meal. The mayor welcomed us and congratulated us on our heroic journey. He thanked the people of Port Townsend. “Everything we are doing will build a peace.” Lifting my glass of cane liquor, I thanked the Jalapenos for welcoming us. “We have travelled more than 6,000 miles to bring you a few things. But these are only things. To us the importance has been in the journey, like a pilgrimage to a holy land.” Sylvio stood up, applauding. “Yes. We are building a holy land. Never has anyThe Poet fluting for liberty at the Nicaraguan border. C/inton St. Dec. ’89-Jan. ’90 27 one tried what we are trying. We will take the despair of our people and build peace, and build a culture.” 22.1WHIFFEDFORPEACE n iding at the heart of Oso Ruidoso, 1 * bolted to the floor, was a more than 3,000 pound generator, another gift from Port Townsend, designed to run the area’s water system, since electricity often failed. We prybarred the mass onto some pipes and rolled it to the edge of the truck. Six beams and 12 men held the machine back. I pushed it slowly forward. When it dropped down onto the beams, three hidden knots gave way and the huge motor started to topple. We watched in horror, but an orange tree caught the machine and lowered it gently to the ground. The tree, which some machete wielders had wanted to cut, had stopped the generator from crushing us or busting itself. The tree was unrooted. After we rolled the generator into its shed, we replanted the faithful orange, glad we had protested its destruction. Guillermo, the mayor, made sure we were on time for the desfile de beisbol, which started from the park with the hand-made carousel built by Port Townsend volunteers and Puente de Paz workers the summer before. We started walking with the four teams who would be playing all day long to decide the regional championship. We tried to teach the marchers “Take Me Out to the Bailgame” in broken Spanish. I played Souza marches on my flute. Our file marched up and down the streets, picking up a crowd as we made our way to the diamond. People showed us their less-than-uniforms and ragged equipment, hopeful we could haul down balls and bats someday. El beisbol is the national game, perhaps deeper in the Nica-psyche than it is in our nation’s. Guillermo decided I should bat to his “ W e ’re an unusual mixture of priests, nuns and atheists, just trying to heal a little of what our government has done.”
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