Remembering Lydia

Whenever I dismounted at Lydia's home of gray boards and dried palm grass, her son hastened to hitch and water my horse while Lydia offered me lemonade and a spell of rest. Then she would walk with me among the shacks of her community, introducing me to other villagers and discussing her concerns about the health needs of her town. Upon returning to her home, she always fed me. I was always famished from the morning on horseback and foot in the relentless sun. She would sit me at the small table in her simple kitchen, where she toiled over the fire, serving me heaps of black beans and rice, fried platanos, and coffee made from beans she had just toasted in a clay pot.

Most of what I learned about life in Nicaragua, I learned from Lydia. Not five feet tall, she was a wiry woman of indigenous ancestry. She took me into her care from the very first time I visited the impoverished town of Las Pilas. She was sunbaked and wrinkled beyond her forty-seven years, always in a dress that was ragged and worn but freshly pressed with an iron she heated on a wood fire. Despite her diminutive size, she was the fiercest of advocates on behalf of her village.

I was a Peace Corps volunteer, and it was 1970. I had come into adulthood on the swell of Kennedy-era idealism intent on changing the world and had no idea how the world beyond North American shores would change me. Nor how the experience would cause me to ponder the oppressiveness of fences even fifty years later.

My horseback commute took me to remote villages on the isthmus between the two volcanoes that composed the Ometepe island in Lake Nicaragua. I worked with campesinos, providing them with health education, distributing donated food, and monitoring the health and development of their children. From lunches with Lydia, I learned that half the children in Las Pilas died from malnutrition, parasites, or infectious diarrhea early in life. There was no s