But her papa doesn't let you come in

(From "Managua, Nicaragua," by Albert Gamse and Irving Fields, recorded in 1946 by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians)

MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- Nicaragua is the poorest country in Central America, and the second poorest (behind Haiti) in all of Latin America.

The LEAMIS / Christ For The City mission team of which I was a part would spend most of its time and effort in a remote, very rural part of Nicaragua, but our first exposure to the country was its capital, Managua, into which we flew on the evening of Jan. 9. The last census of Managua gave it a population of about 1 million, but the actual figure today could be as many as 1.5 million.

It's not the happy Latin playground that Guy Lombardo immortalized in 1946. On our flight from Houston to Managua, a local told Gail Drake, the co-founder of LEAMIS, that we should watch ourselves and hold tightly onto our luggage once we stepped outside the doors of the Managua airport. We took that advice.

The 14 of us who flew from Houston to Managua were met at the airport by Frank Schroer, one of our team members who had come to Central America early in order to do some prep work in Costa Rica for another LEAMIS project, and by Amanda Van Deman, a Managua-based full-time missionary with Christ For The City International. (Some of the women remarked among themselves about Amanda's tank top; at our November training, the women had been advised by Gail and the Rev. Debra Snellen not to bring anything sleeveless.)

We crammed ourselves onto a Nissan Civilian bus, which CFCI had rented for the duration of the trip. The bus had about 18 or so regular seats, plus some additional seats that folded down into the aisle. These had to be filled from the back of the bus forward, of course, because once a seat had been unfolded it blocked the aisle and made it impossible to get to the seats behind.

Our driver carefully packed all of our luggage into the back seat of the bus, leaving us to wedge ourselves into the remaining seats. We thought we were crowded, but within a few days we'd have an entirely new idea of how many people could be crammed onto that bus.

This was my first trip abroad, and though it was dark outside I eagerly peered out of the bus as we pulled away from the airport. The first thing I saw was ... a Best Western hotel. But once we were clear of the airport, we began to see the sprawling mix of squalor and commerce that is Managua. The buildings were thin-walled (temperatures in Managua are never cold) and dirty.

My teammate Laurie Schroder, sitting right in front of me on the bus, noticed many gated doors and windows.

"You can tell there's a lot of poverty," she said.

Refrescante aqui

There were dozens of signs for "pulperias." I asked about this and was told that a pulperia is a small mom-and-pop "store," if you want to call it that. It's tiny even by convenience-store standards and may even be just the front room in someone's home, with a few items hanging on the wall and a refrigerator to hold soft drinks.

There are also American-style convenience stores, sometimes jarringly clean, new and attractive next to their surroundings. They look just like the American counterparts from the outside, but the gas prices are in cordobas (the Nicaraguan currency) per gallon. The prices seemed to range from the high 20s to the lower 30s per gallon. With the cordoba worth about 7 cents, a price of 30 cordobas per gallon would work out to about $2.10 per gallon. Relatively few people drive in Nicaragua, which has a wealth of taxis.

I don't know why the prices were in cordobas per gallon instead of per liter, by the way, since Nicaragua uses the metric system for other things.

America's great contribution to the world, carbonated soft drinks, are everywhere in Nicaragua, from the inner city to the remote farm town. I don't think I saw a single vending machine, but there are scores and scores of little kiosks from which Coke and Pepsi are sold at the appropriate hours. "REFRESCANTE AQUI" ("REFRESHMENT HERE") was the slogan on many signs.

Most soft drinks in Nicaragua, especially in rural areas, are sold in returnable glass bottles like the ones you remember. If you want to take your drink with you, the shop owner will pop it open and pour it into, I swear, a plastic bag. The bag is tied shut and you drink from it by biting or snipping open one corner.

Laurie noticed horses on the roadside in the city. She also noticed something else.

"That man's got a rifle over his shoulder," she said. I missed seeing it, but the man was standing in front of a small market.

The bus took us to a small, gated retreat facility called La Cantera, on the edge of Managua. It was a lovely place, lushly landscaped with tropical trees and flowers. The accommodations were comfortable, though not fancy. There we met Alcides Fuentes, head of CFCI's Nicaragua office and Amanda's boss. He doesn't speak much English, but even through a translator you could hear what a heart this man has for ministry.

Training

LEAMIS is built on the idea of training. Debra and Gail founded the group with the idea that preparing a team for ministry is key. Some groups send mission teams with little or no training; they simply get off the airplane and start working. If the only object of the project is, say, construction, that system can work. But LEAMIS believes that real ministry requires something more. The training includes not just logistical information but also spiritual preparation. Training exercises help the team-building process and encourage the participants to explore their expectations and attitudes.

We'd had an intense training weekend back in November in Germantown; now, we had a two-day training and acclimatization process. For some LEAMIS trips, the first day of that training takes place in the U.S., but the logistics of this trip put both days in Nicaragua.

On Friday, the first training day, we stayed on the La Cantera campus. We continued some of the themes of our September training. We also practiced some of the skits we would use during worship services and other activities in El Triunfo.

Peace Park

On Saturday, the second training day, we got to get out into the city for part of the day. The trip started with some sightseeing. We drove past Dennis Martinez Stadium, named after the Nicaraguan who became a star of Major League Baseball. Martinez became a cultural icon in his homeland.

Amanda took us to see the park where the Cultural Palace, a museum, faces the Presidential Palace, the offices of the nation's president. (Despite the name, he doesn't actually live there.) Between the two buildings is a cathedral, damaged in a 1972 earthquake. Its replacement was built elsewhere; the husk of the old cathedral was left standing as a sort of monument. That earthquake devastated Managua's downtown area, and it was never really rebuilt, leaving the city with an odd, decentralized sprawl.

But it's not just natural disaster that has affected Nicaragua. Facing the cathedral is a monument erected by the FSLN, the political party associated with the Sandinista movement. The civil war of the 1980s pitted the Sandinistas against the U.S.-backed Contras. It was just the latest in a series of conflicts. Since Nicaragua's founding in 1823, there has rarely been peace for as long as a decade, said Amanda.

The next stop on our sightseeing tour was a harrowing, and yet hopeful, reminder of the most recent war. Violeta Chamorro, elected president in the free elections which followed the war, built Peace Park as a statement that the conflict was not to be repeated. The park includes a tank covered in concrete, and various rifles and other weapons which have been partially buried in concrete, their barrels protruding as an eerie reminder of the conflict past.

Nicaragua is not yet out of trouble. Chamorro was a noble leader but ineffective. Her successor, Arnoldo Aleman, was effective but corrupt, and was charged with embezzling more than $100 million of his country's funds. The U.S. ambassador complained that millions of dollars in relief we sent to Nicaragua after Hurricane Mitch has been misused and misspent.

Aleman's hand-picked vice-president, Enrique Bolaņos, is the current president, and his anti-corruption platform has put him at odds with his predecessor.

Amanda said she believes, and hopes, the country is on the upswing at the moment. If it can hold off natural and military disasters, perhaps it has a chance to heal for a while.

The war may be over, but the old alliances are still very much there. The FSLN (Sandinista) and PLC (Contra) parties are still the two main political factions, and you see their initials painted on buildings and telephone polls across the country. Chamorro, Aleman and Bolaņos are all members of the PLC, but don't think the FSLN has gone away.

But the primary purpose of our outing wasn't sightseeing. The bus took us to a mercado (market), where we would haggle for all of the ingredients of that evening's supper. We'd been divided into teams; one team worked on salad, another worked on beverages (no soft drinks; natural juices made from Nicaragua's copious output of tropical fruits, plus a thick and sticky-sweet drink made from corn). Two other teams worked on main dish items. The exercise served as a team-builder, an introduction to Nicaraguan currency, and a beginning of our exposure to the Third World.

The Road to El Triunfo

On Sunday morning, training was over and it was time to head to the small town where we were to do our ministry. We crammed ourselves and our luggage back onto the bus and headed out about 6 a.m.

On the way, we stopped for a quick breakfast at a bakery in Managua. A small child was sleeping on the sidewalk, wrapped in a blanket. Gail bought an orange juice from the bakery and left it next to the sleeping child.

El Triunfo is only about 150 miles from Managua, but the bus ride between the city and the town takes eight hours. In some areas, the pavement has a strange pattern: 50 yards or so of good pavement followed by 50 yards or so of completely chewed up pavement. James Schroder, a retired Army officer who has been writing the official history of U.S. special forces in Afghanistan, said the damage was almost certainly related to the civil war of the 1980s. One side had deliberately destroyed the road in order to slow down the other side.

Even the portions of road which hadn't been deliberately damaged were riddled with potholes.

We did run into some paving projects in the second half of the journey, so the Nicaraguan government is apparently working to undo some of the damage.

We frequently saw livestock on the road. Once, two cattlemen on horseback were driving a huge herd towards us. As the bus slowly made its way past the herd, some of the cows started to turn and follow us. We stopped so that the herders could get all the cattle moving in the right direction again.

We stopped for lunch at an American-style convenience store in Santo Tomas. Frank, a veteran of previous mission trips, wandered across the street to a store that sold horse tack. He bought a pair of spurs. A wiry old man hanging around the store attempted to converse with various members of our party, until the town constabulary threw him out.

Arrival

It was mid-afternoon when we drove up to the New Jerusalem Baptist Church in El Triunfo. A collection of church members -- our hosts for the week -- were gathered there to meet us, as was Pastor Luis Gutierrez. Our housing assignments were made quickly.

Frank and I, along with Sonja Goold and Michelle Schussler, would live in Montevideo, a neighborhood a mile or two outside of El Triunfo. We crammed 15 people, along with luggage for the four of us, into a 5-passenger Jeep and headed for the house.

After assessing our living situation (which I described on Monday), I began handing out Life Savers to the collection of 10 to 15 kids, most of them from neighboring houses, who had gathered to check out the gringo visitors.

Frank, within a few minutes, had made himself at home and was riding one of the neighbors' horses. He'd also lost the spurs that he bought in Santo Tomas. He thought he was loaning them to one of the neighbor children, but the boy thought Frank was giving them away.

It was shaping up to be an interesting week.

WEDNESDAY: The perils of oogley