Sontule (read this before the prior post if you want chronological order...)

The group and I are back from Sontule, a rural community 40 minutes outside of the city of Esteli. Honestly, I was not expecting to enjoy myself to the extent that I did. The group and I got out of a packed week building up to a substantial paper that we finished the night before leaving. One could say that the timing worked out great, but my mindset was just not into the extra moving around at the time...
Now I am surprised at the feelings I have when when thinking about the family I stayed with, after just less than four days of being in their presence... I miss them...really! The environment we were surrounded in was truly phenomenal. Never in Central America have I seen farm land like that which I saw while living in Sontule from Monday to Thursday. Amy, a friend from the group, and I lived together with Doña Isabel, Don Franciso, Henry, Xaña, Araseli, Kevin, and little Fabricio (who is just about to be two years old and is the neatest child I have come across in Central America thus far... I have got to say that by yesterday, he started calling me "Chía," (his way of saying "Tía") which touched my heart incredibly). Our leaders warned us about the drastic climate change (Sontule being quite colder than the intense Managuan heat), but I didn't actually believe it until I felt and heard the fuerte wind that approached and grew from the afternoon on...
While there we learned about the three different cooperatives that Sontule takes part in under the organizational entity of UCA Miraflor. The women's cooperative was specifically emphasized. It was after the Agrarian Reform in 1991 when each family in Sontule was given 16 manzanas (1 manzana = 1.7 acres) of land. Before that time, specifically during the Somoza dictatorship, inhabitants of Sontule worked on a coffee plantation for Rene Molina (who was soon to become a millionaire after working as a deptuty/representative for Somoza)... the farm workers were mainly "blind," as they said, to the inhumane actions and policies of Somoza. They were also working as slaves. But many claimed that they knew nothing else, so it was normal life for them.
It was when different groups from various Nicaraguan cities and international orgs came to meet with the campesinos when they began to realize the wrongs that were being done to them and the injustices that were being imposed upon Nicaragua as a whole... It was around that time when many of the coffee plantation workers began to organize and join the guerrillas against Somoza...
This story was and is lived by the host family that Amy and I stayed with...

Here is a recent article from the New York Times. It can give you a more formal idea of what has been going on around here... PS: the FSLN is now claiming the the US has something to do with the charges of fraud against them... This is odd, especially because the US is sponsoring some of the FSLN's advertisements and organizational groups...

more to come....
love and peace--