A Week in Nicaragua

As my plane approached the airport in Managua, we flew low over a poor neighborhood where dirt streets were lined with a random patchwork of tattered shacks.  As we passed over this neighborhood, I could not help but overhear three kids from the United States, maybe age 20 or so, who were on a surfing expedition, remark about the abject poverty below us, as if it were the first time they had ever witnessed such a spectacle.  They wondered out loud how anyone could live in such squalor conditions.  I don’t know, but I imagine they went directly from the airport to the beach with their custom-made surfboards and stayed at a nice hotel for a week of surfing and partying.  I wondered at the time if their brief voyeuristic glance into an impoverished neighborhood from a plane would be their most lasting impression of Nicaragua. What message would they  bring home with them?  What message would I bring?

It was my good fortune that a friend put me in contact with Guillermo Cortes, the editor of Medios y Mensajes, and Guillermo graciously agreed to accompany me on my little journey.  Guillermo’s friend, Orlando Rosales, the former Mayor of Villa Sandino, also joined us for a few days.  Although I had a couple of places in mind that I wanted to visit, my plans were open, and since Guillermo needed to conduct some research for a novel he was working on, I let him decide where we would go. We began by driving to Chontales shortly after landing in Managua, stopping first for lunch and then briefly in Juigalpa before proceeding to our final destination for the evening - San Tomás and Villa Sandino.  We left early the following morning, before sunrise, and followed a magical dirt road deep into Nicaragua’s interior.  Orlando told us about battles that were fought along this road between the Sandinistas and Contras not so many years ago.  Until that moment, the counter-revolution never seemed real to me and even then it was hard to imagine blood being spilled in such an incredibly beautiful place.  

Orlando had to return to Managua the following day, so Guillermo and I left him in San Benito to catch a bus and we continued north to Ciudad Darío, Sébaco and Matagalpa.  From there, we visited the coffee plantation, Selva Negra, and then Jinotega (Guillermo’s birthplace) and San Raphael del Norte.  We stayed at the ranch of a friend of Guillermo’s deep in the mountains of northern Nicaragua near San Juan de Limay.  Before returning to Managua, we traveled to the colonial city of León. 

My photographs of Nicaragua, like much of my work, are simple compositions of every day life – basically people being people.  They are, of course, images as seen through my eyes and I cannot deny that by the pure accident of my birth, some prejudices undoubtedly creep into the images.