Tony's Travel Blog Part 4
Tony Traback, our Pastor of Mission Mobilization, recently returned from a trip to Honduras and Nicaragua to spend time with our partners there. We are presenting his reflections in a four-part series. This is fourth and final installment reflecting on the end of his trip in Nicaragua. View the first installment here, the second here, and the third here.
bLoG4: Nicaragua Thoughts, We Made it out of Clay
I would be remiss to write about San Juan de Oriente and not have an entry dedicated to ceramics. As I mentioned earlier, every home I entered was also a workshop. And I should say it is like entering into a history—both familial and communal. The word workshop does not communicate the personal passing on of their tradition from generation to generation. In every home, a father or a mother had passed on her skills to her children. Father had taught son. Mother had taught daughter. In one home, I met three generations of potters—grandmother instructed mother, mother taught daughter and daughter I am sure will teach her daughters if she has any. So, to enter a home is to enter an on-going story. In this particular multi-generational home, the grandmother handed me a ceramic vase, which she had found as a child. Apparently, it was from hundreds of year previous. From her ancestors…
And it is story, which also is linked to the earth. All their clay comes from the earth, found in their backyards and the countryside. Many of the colors used to decorate are also from a local lakeshore. And interestingly, not only are the paintbrushes made from sticks and the like but the bristles are often composed of human hair.
One of the things which I find most frustrating about consumption in the US is not that we consume too much but rather that we consume poorly and not enough. These potters consume resources that they gather themselves from their local community. We consume items shipped across the globe. And they consume thoroughly—they even use their hair for bristles! We eat half of a sandwich and toss it; we buy new technological devices every year, trashing last year’s model which seemed to all observers to work just fine. And so it goes.
On my second day in San Juan de Oriente, I walked into Sully and Celia’s family home (they work at La Vida) and their father greeted me and proceeded to explain to me about their town and pottery. Have you ever been in a situation when the person talking to you really seems to know what he is saying? Because, you know how sometimes people go on and on about things they have never experienced. (My favorite is when people have dogmatic opinions about things they have never read.) When their father began to talk about their town and pottery you knew he knew his stuff. It helped that his hands were covered in clay. We must have just interrupted him. In one hand he held what looked like a pot’s handle, which he preparing to attach. With the other, he gesticulated as he told his story.
San Juan de Oriente made plates, cups and other functional pottery when the rest of country was eating food out of leaves. People from around the country and Central America came to San Juan de Oriente to trade. It was so famous for its ceramics that it was affectionately named San Juan de Los Platos.
And then in the 1970’s “Western” banks came to the pueblo. They saw the commercial potential of the enterprise and made the economic most of it. They encouraged the potters to make more decorative and less functional, pieces to sell to tourists. So, in addition to utilitarian and rustic ceramics, they began to make pre-Columbian copies and other creative pieces. They also gave the potters colors, which they did not have—of which black was most significant. Furthermore, to increase the speed of production, they also introduced the spinning wheel.
[Lost in translation (due to my limited Spanish) was whether these additions were particularly helpful. What benefits resulted from these additions and did they have long-term positive results? Yes, a tourist received a beautiful vase and set it on her table in Madrid. But did the woman and the future potters in her household benefit? These are questions I ask myself but was not able to ask at the time.]
One thing that did not change in the 1970’s was oven construction. In backyards around the town ovens cook clay. Little brick igloos heat clay to over 800 degrees. It is amazing. Taking a peak at the brick igloos I was puzzled by the simple and yet profound engineering. A $4000 industrial pottery-baking device could do no better. This backyard over made of local materials did the job. And from my perspective, based on the beautiful ceramics throughout the town, it did an excellent job. Moreover, they built it. They formed the oven with their own hands and because of this were given a skill which flipping switch on machines rarely does. Like most modern machinery, it increases speed but decreases skill. Too often, a sad exchange, if you ask me.
bLoG5: Nicaragua Thoughts, Public Gatherings, Time and How to Be
We just showed up at people’s homes. Unannounced, we entered and chatted.
If we tried to just show up at each their homes in the US, it is not that people would not welcome the visitors (I hope), but that most of us would not be home. We are busy, productive and paying for entertainment.
I find it significant that the people of San Juan de Oriente often gather without paying for a reason to gather. From what I could tell, they rarely go to movies or pay for someone to entertain them to provide significance to being gathered. They simply eat together and talk. They just sit in parks and lookouts. They sit in one another’s homes. It is a beautiful thing. So often this is not true of us. This is why actors and actresses, spots players and other famous people make so much money! We pay their salaries.
But this is not even the primary point I want to make. Time is not king in Central America. In the US, time rules. Sure, Jesus is greater than Cesar but is Jesus really more important than our time? In Silicon Valley the watch (followed by the chip) is king. I can’t tell you how liberating it was for me to enter slow life. I felt no pressure to be productive with my time or to fill it. Waiting for someone for 30 minutes was less frustrating because my schedule was not packed. As I waited, I enjoyed the chicken strutting on the streets, pigs pacing, and thin horses munching on grass. And if I were lucky, a beautiful parrot would land nearby, showing off. Or other times I would simply watch the sky and dark clouds prowling or simply become lost in absent-minded thought.
The pace, the slowness, reminded me of Sabbath slowness. A slowness that accepts the simple fact that God is in control, not us—a slowness which embraces being a limited and humble creature that will die but whose creator is gracious and merciful. If I were to contrast this Sabbath orientation to our orientation in the US, it would be like the simple and yet profound story of the tortuous and the hare. And we all remember who “wins” in the end.
bLoG6: Nicaragua Thoughts, Exporting Technological Culture
My conversation with Gerardo Rodriquez, San Juan de Oriente’s priest took place in an adjoining room of the Internet café. Its location is ironic given one of the topics, which we discussed: electronic technology. While Westerners are becoming more aware of the cultural perspectives, biases and assumptions that they bring to a place, few of us even consider the technological culture that we bring with us and that it is being spread around the globe without thought of its consequences. When the priest said something along these lines (though much more diplomatically), he was surprised that I heartily agreed with his critique.
For instance, most of us assume that technological progress is a good thing. Health care saves more lives. Advances in engineering enable water distribution and ensure the water’s safety. The examples are numerous. And they are real and good improvements.
But we rarely consider the other technological “advances” which we adopt and then pass onto the rest of the world. For instance, cell phones. I was surprised to see how many people in Nicaragua have cell phones. And my immediate question is whether or not this is a good addition to culture—whether in the US or otherwise. Just like in the US, I saw people gathered together in a crowd of friends text messaging and phone-focused.
Or TV. Is the TV a societal good? Now that electricity has arrived, TV’s are becoming central to living room arraignments—with TV as focal point. How will this affect social and family life? In the US, the facts are very clear about how it affects family life.
Or Ipods? I have seen young people walking around wearing earphones and even wearing them in the presence of friends. In the US, the same is true. Is this a societal good? Better yet, is it an ecclesial good?
Questions to consider are how does technology affect our understanding of the incarnation and therefore embodiment? How does it affect the speed of our lives and the practice of the Sabbath and walking with a Slow God—a God who walked for forty years a distance that most humans cross in two weeks? How does our technological culture affect our consumption and our relationship to the earth? How does our tech culture lead to the disenchantment of our perceived reality and therefore lead us from the awe in which we encounter God’s presence?
As I visited Honduras I asked myself whether such (and other) technological advances are really ecclesial goods? If not, then why don’t we even talk about them? Such “advances” are spreading across the globe. These “advances” have not only affected the US church but now they are spreading to the rest of the globe. What are we to do? I believe that if we are the presence of Christ whenever we are, then we need to seriously begin to question whether the technologies that we place so much hope in (yes, hope) are actually an ecclesial good. These are not only questions for US Christians serving around the globe but they are essential questions for all of us living in one of the most technological valleys on the earth. Technology is not bad in itself. I am no Luddite or technophobe. But like anything it can be used for good or for ill. And, yet, I only hear a chorus of its potential good. Why is that?