The woman next door

 

  I’m raking leaves outside our house when she approaches me, carrying an empty garbage can that she says will make it easier to gather the leaves for garbage pickup the next day. Paul and I are renting a house for the month of March in Leon, Nicaragua, and the woman and her family live next door.

    At first, I think she has come over just to be nice, because she has lived a long time near this giant tree that constantly sheds leaves and branches and knows how to make the near-daily task of raking a little easier. But she later tells me that she always tries to engage extranjeras like me in conversation. Too many of us arrive in her country with no knowledge of Nicaragua’s troubled history, she says. She is on a one-woman campaign to change that.

    I don’t know how old she is – mid-50s, maybe? That would make her around 19 on the terrible night of May 4, 1979 when the Nicaraguan National Guard, under the direction of the corrupt and vicious president Anastasio Somoza, showed up at 2 a.m. to pull her two brothers from their beds and kill them in the street outside the family home. Right here in this very street, she tells me, pointing to the home a block away where her family was living when it happened. Right in front of her.

    Brothers Porfirio Rene and Oswaldo Jose Alonso Palma were among four young men killed by the National Guard that night. Within two months, Somoza would be gone – first to Miami, where he fled in July 1979, and later assassinated in Panama. The Sandinista revolution was already well underway by the time the four young men were killed, but victory came too late to save them.

    War and death was a Nicaraguan reality for much of the 1900s - first under three generations of Somozas, then during the Sandinista revolution in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and later through nine bloody years of U.S.- and Soviet Union-funded civil war in the 1980s. The good people of Leon – a community of rebellious university students and cultured, intellectual thinkers – were strong supporters of the Sandinista revolution, and would watch many of their children die in the streets before the fighting finally ended in 1989.

    The leader of the Sandinistas, Daniel Ortega, has been part of Nicaragua’s political scene ever since. He led the reconstruction of the country after the last of the Somozas was finally banished, then was elected president for five years in 1985. Then came 17 long years of political banishment before he was re-elected president in 2007.  

    There are those in Nicaragua nowadays who have been deeply disappointed by Ortega’s inability to deliver on so many of the promises made during those revolutionary years. But my neighbour isn’t one of them. She refers to the president and his wife as “Daniel and Rosario,” and it’s clear she feels a very personal connection to them. She says that those who criticize Ortega are either too young to remember how things used to be, or too impatient in their expectations for rapid change.

    In 1979 when her brothers were killed, this little two-block neighbourhood where we live was called Duque. But after that awful night, the city renamed it Colonia 4 de Mayo – the Fourth of May. A small plaque has been placed outside the woman’s childhood home at the end of the block, commemorating the murders of her brothers along with those of Roger Benito Morales Toruño and Noel Ernesto García Zepeda that same night.

    Remember them, she tells me. She scoops up the last of the leaves and returns to her house, called in for dinner by her young grandson.