This is the story of a family business that reaches beyond the borders of our troubled country. And you can be forgiven if you flinch. “Enough!” you might say. “Enough tales of the Trump White House.” But this is not about family profiteering, high-end fashion or luxury hotels. It is the story of one small NGO, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, Artists for Soup.
The history of NGOs, which vary tremendously in size and reach, goes back as far as humanitarian associations in 13th century China, and NGOs in the middle of the 19th century became increasingly international. Today there are many thousands at work, and they are likely to become more important in a time when governments abroad appear to be drawn to their own versions of our president’s “America First.”
My take on the possible origin of Artists for Soup begins in a 1987 memorial service for a young American engineer, Ben Linder, and two young Nicaraguans, Sergio Hernandez and Pablo Rosales. I happened to be in Nicaragua to see the effects of our “low-intensity” war there, and those three men, who were working on a small hydroelectric project, had just been killed by a U.S.-funded Contra patrol.
The memorial service, held in Managua at Santa Maria de los Angeles, included the music of several guitarists and vocalists, as well as a North American fiddler who improvised beautifully during breaks. Jugglers celebrated Ben Linder’s skills as a unicycle-riding clown, and there were colorful murals on the walls of the church’s round nave, painted by volunteer artists from Italy.
Linder’s mother spoke about his fears while growing up, insisting he lost them when he began working in Nicaragua, where he had just been buried. And another of the many things that moved me about the memorial service was the way Nicaraguan speakers, including Franciscan Father Uriel Molina in his homily, gently distinguished between the Reagan administration’s surreptitious war-making in their country and the peace-making efforts of many people in the U.S.
When I returned to the U.S., I talked a lot about that memorial service, and one person who listened was a friend, journalist Fred Bruning, who soon flew off to San Jose de Bocay, where Linder was killed. Bruning traveled around Nicaragua interviewing people who knew the engineer, and he visited the Linder family in Portland, Ore.. Then he wrote a powerful, magazine-length story about the killings for the Long Island daily, Newsday.
In 1990, our daughter, Judith Nichols, who in 1987 was living in Costa Rica near its border with Nicaragua, published Elegy for the Engineer Who Rode a Unicycle, made partly from details about Ben Linder’s life gathered by Fred Bruning. The elegy ultimately became part of Blood Moon, Bright Stars (2016), a poetry collection, in which she describes the connection between her poems and Artists for Soup.
Near the end of Blood Moon, Bright Stars she offers this hopeful view of our challenging, shared future: “As rivers of people stream out of torn countries and our climate heats up, I imagine people working in big ways and small to help their sisters and brothers build communities and find fertile ground.”
Artists for Soup, the organization Judith directs, builds on peoples’ potential to be teachers and artists. Working within community groups in three regions of Nicaragua, local women make fertile gardens in exhausted soil, build solar ovens for cooking where firewood is hard to find, teach reading classes and operate an arts collective. The hub for much of this work is the Artists for Soup community center in La Paz Centro, a small city north of the capital, Managua.
Our president was elected on promises to do something a little like that in America, but it is already clear his administration will focus instead on protecting the wealth and the health of people on top. And Republicans in the House and Senate will make sure fewer of our tax dollars go to help the “rivers of people” fleeing torn countries. We’re more likely to pay for walls and bombs than for fertile gardens while our president and his family invite us to aspire to gold curtains like theirs instead of building communities.
But in Nicaragua and many other countries, local and international groups work together to support health, education, human rights and the environment, often joining with small collectives run by women. NGOs find such partnerships provide benefits and grounding not only for people in struggling communities but also for people who have the resources to come together and learn how to contribute material support across borders. And Matagalpa, the city where Ben Linder is buried, has become a center for a number of Nicaraguan-led women’s organizations built on the faith that humility, hard work and compassion can build a more humane world.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.