Our first interview - on Casa Xalteva, kids in the streets, contras and commitment.

Yesterday we had our first real interview. We interviewed the director of the Spanish school we´re currently studying in, a place called Casa Xalteva. Meeri started off by asking about the social work aspect of Casa Xalteva and the children's rights issues of Nicaragua. Then I continued interviewing him about the Somoza dynasty, the revolution in 1979, the civil war and the contras.

Jose Luis Bodán, the director of Casa Xalteva, is a dedicated man approaching his 30's. He has been involved in the activities in Casa Xalteva since the beginning and knows both of the two founders of the place

Casa Xalteva is a "non-profit educational and charitable organization" (their definition in their webpage) that has two main functions. The first is to help the kids of Granada - a limited number, of course, given the very limited resources - to get off from the streets. Casa Xalteva provides shelter, schooling and a safe heaven to them. At the moment only one kid lives in Casa Xalteva permanently, but from early in the morning to late evening, excluding the hours which are spent in the governmental school, more or less seven kids are here studying and playing.

Having huge amounts of kids living and working in the streets is not a significant problem here in Granada. Managua, the capital, is a different and worse case, but it's not our focus right now. In the good old days, when this country was ruled by a family dictatorship and its nerve center, the not-so-goofy Guardia Nacional, there used to be a national problem of street kids. After the good old days ended and FSLN took over, the problem pretty much vanished. But not permanently. After the National Opposition Union won the elections in 1990, in circumstances that I wish to elaborate later, the problem started to reappear. And not too slowly: the number of the kids in the streets more or less doubled every year, during many consecutive years.

Meeri also asked Jose Luis whether exploitation of child labour exists in Nicaragua. Child labour phenomenon, a basic and natural indicator of poverty, does exist here, for sure. Like in many other countries, parents are the "employers" of their offspring. There are areas and countries in which private companies, including the international giants, exploit the adult and child labour very efficiently, but Nicaragua is not one of them. Sure, there is maquiladora-style work in Nicaragua, too, but in the particular case of child labour that's not the main issue here. The normal way here, in many poor areas and families, is for the parents to "employ", as it's sometimes put, their kids. What it often means, in practice, is that kids work long hours in the streets. Their actual work is selling all kids small things, like juice, milk, handicraft, tobacco, candies etc. In Managua, the capital more or less triple the size of Helsinki, in which the child labour issue is a major problem, besides selling the same things they sell here in Granada, a lot of kids work in the traffic lights washing windshields. And the parents get a lion's share of the money their kids make.

Jose Luis also shared a very illuminative incident with us. When he was studying in Alaska he ran into a guy who was his countryman. This Nicaraguan was very polite and social, and at one point Jose Luis visited his house. When Jose Luis entered his room he couldn't believe what he saw. There was a picture of Che Guevara in the wall of his room. That's not abnormal - who wouldn't have one in his/her wall - but the interesting part was that the guy, as it had just turned out, was en ex-contra. Contras, or contrarevolucionarios, were a terrorist force created with the substantial help of Central Intelligence Agency and Argentinian government in the 80's to harass the FSLN regime. I will perhaps write about that later. Their regular tactics of warfare were too disgusting to be described at the moment and they were, politically, somewhere boyond far-right. Now, how is it possible that an ex-contra has a picture of Che Guevara, the iconic figure of a leftist revolution and the object of hysterical hatred by right wing worldwide, in his wall? That was the question Jose Luis uttered and the answer was revealing. The core of it was that “well, you know, I didn’t really agree with their politics, but they paid me well”. He went on to say to Che really is his idol. (To Jose Luis this experience seemed to be something he will never forget, a permanent example of how money corrupts, especially when there’s an urgent and never-ending need for it – namely in very poor countries. It is, however, a little difficult not to question the seriousness of anyone’s commitment to any cause if that person is ready to become an active tool for the absolute enemies of that alleged conviction. In short, how serious can a commitment be if it is completely sacrificed when money comes in?)

The example of that Nicaraguan summarizes, in my view, the fallaciousness and, unfortunately, effectiveness of the CIA interventions and bribery in most of the poor countries in which they operate. That particular “Che/Contra”, we shouldn’t forget, was not an exception. A surprisingly big percentage of the contras were, before their new job, “normal people”, whatever that means, not fanatical mass-murderers who maim and mutilate thousands of civilians, which is what the contras were.

Talking about commitment, it's not very hard to point out to a different example right away: Jose Luis, who has master's degree and a lot of work experience which looks good on CV, works at Casa Xalteva, earning very little money and enjoying none of the luxuries he might have if he had chosen otherwise. Why he works there? We all know why.

We will go to Managua next week and there’s a lot of interesting NGOs for us to choose from as we’re trying to figure out who to interview. I will write about what happens when we know it.

Hope you're all doing fine, best wishes,

Bruno.