Spirit in Action
Davida Johns - "Mature" Peace Corps volunteer and ProNica - Quaker aid to Nicaragua
Davida Johns is the stateside organizer of an organization called ProNica - in favor of Nicaragua, folks who reach out to some Latin American friends, providing life-enhancing assistance to a country badly treated by the US government. Davida came to this job following her experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Belize when she was in her 50's.
- Broadcast on:
- 17 May 2009
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- other
I have no hands but yours to tempt my sheep. No handkerchief but yours to dry the eyes of those who weep. I have no arms but yours with which to hold. The ones grown weary from the struggle and weak from growing old. I have no voice but yours with which to see. To let my children know that I am out and out is everything. I have no way to feed the hungry souls. No clothes to give and make you the ragged and the morn. So be my heart, my hand, my tongue, through you all will be done. The enders have I none to help untie. Welcome to Spirit in Action, my name is Mark Helpsmeet. Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Above all, I'll seek out light, love and helping hands, being shared between our many neighbors on this planet, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. I have no way to open people's eyes, except that you will show them how to trust the inner mind. Today for Spirit in Action, I'm taking you south to sunny Florida for a visit with Divita Johns. Among other important works she's done, Divita served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Belize when she was already in her 50s. That experience of the late 1990s helped change the glasses through which she sees the world and Divita now works as the stateside coordinator for Proneka. Proneka is an organization that works in partnership with groups in Nicaragua to better the lives of the needy people there. Whether it's feeding the hungry children living in and on Monagua's City Dump, working to get glue sniffing addicted children off the streets and into a sane or future, or whether it's helping health clinics have the resources they need to provide care, Proneka offers an opportunity for rich Americans of the USA to lend a hand to their poor Latin American cousins, and in the USA almost all of us are rich. This interview with Divita Johns took place a few weeks back when I was traveling through Florida as part of a Quaker folk dance group called the Friendly Folk Dancers. One day during that visit, Divita and I took a break by a rather lively and noisy beach facing on Tampa Bay and I asked her about her experience in the Peace Corps and the work of Proneka. Divita, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. You're welcome. I think we should let our guests know where we are. We're sitting here on the waterfront in St. Petersburg, Florida. Are you a long time Floridian? I've been in Florida for about 40 years. So is that long? Three fifths of my life or? Does that include the period that you spent as a Peace Corps volunteer down in Belize? Yes. I went to Belize in '99 to '01 and I had been in Florida for over 30 years at that time. You work for an organization right now called Proneka. Can you tell me what the mission of Proneka is and why you chose to work for it? Well, that's easy. I was a feminist photographer, freelance photographer working on peace and social justice issues and I donated a lot of my photography for different issues about farm workers in Florida. The migrant workers up the migrant stream, I worked in Appalachia, I worked with women and non-traditional occupations trying to raise awareness about the fact that women can do all sorts of things. Habitat for Humanity House and at that time I was invited by Proneka's current newsletter editor to go to Nicaragua and photograph their project partners. So I did and while I was in Nicaragua for a month doing this photography, I met three mature Peace Corps volunteers in Nicaragua who partnered with the same people we did for a fishing project on one of the lakes down there. And I got the idea that I could join the Peace Corps even at my age. So in my mid-50s I quit my job, sold my house and went in the Peace Corps. When I came back from Peace Corps I spent about a year working with migrant workers in Central Florida and then when this position at Proneka came open it just seemed like a natural circle to come back to. What is Proneka, I mean I guess from the name I can see it's not anti-Niquera and that Niquera is Nicaragua, right? Yes, the name Proneka came because it is for Nicaragua. Basically the mission there is we work with grassroots groups who decide themselves what it is they need to do. As Quakers we believe everyone has that, of God in themselves and that they have the knowledge and the experience they know exactly what they need to do they just need help making that happen. So Proneka will partner with groups, put them in touch with other people, arrange for training. We raise funds to support projects such as library, schools, clinics and agricultural projects. How long has Proneka been around? Is it a relatively new thing or does it go back in centuries? Proneka goes back to the mid-80s when some Quakers in Southeastern Yearly meeting here in Florida went to Nicaragua with a concern with the U.S.-backed Contra War against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. They were down there just in solidarity working with the people to see what they could do to help. They came back to Southeastern Yearly meeting and asked for support so Proneka has been around that long it started truly as a grassroots solidarity with the groups in Nicaragua. The Sandinistas were and still are very co-op oriented they work in groups very well. Someone call them socialist depending on your point of view but they make sure everybody has what they need and Proneka was involved way back then with the embargo that limited equipment and supplies going to Nicaragua Proneka began collecting up supplies, school supplies, medical supplies, clothes, loaded up huge shipping containers and over the course of eight years then about twenty containers down to Nicaragua. When Ortega was voted out of office because the people in Nicaragua just got tired of the U.S. sanctions against them they were tired of the difficulties that they were working through so they voted in someone more to the liking of the U.S. government and at that time things were easier to get a hold of and so the people that we worked with in Nicaragua didn't really need the supplies as much as they just needed the money to get them and at that point that's when we started raising funds for projects so we don't really collect items and materials anymore for them we raise funds. The federal government of the United States when President Reagan was in charge basically was anti-nicaragua at that point did that mean that the Quakers were then were anti-U.S. by being pro-nicaragua? I would hope that the Quakers are not so political we're pro people and wherever anyone needs help that's where I would feel Quakers would be we're very involved right here in St. Petersburg with the homeless population. Can you give me examples David of people concretely affected by the work of Proneka and in this case it might be people in Nicaragua or it might be the people going to do the work with Nicaragua. Well first comes to mind is me I mean I was a computer programmer I'm very secure in my job with insurance and cable TV and all like that and when I went to Nicaragua it totally changed my life it opened my eyes to the fact that most people in the world don't live the lifestyle that we have and the inequities of that imbalance and how people struggle because we're up here running our air conditioners we want cheap clothes so we're willing to buy clothes that are made in sweatshops well those sweatshops are right down there on the outskirts of Menagua I've heard it call the Walmart mentality of wanting everything is just as cheap as it can be and what that does is it just people race to the bottom it doesn't do a farmer any good to raise coffee beans if he has to sell them below what it cost him to make them but that's what we're expecting here when we want to go someplace and find the cheapest whatever whether it's shirts out of JCPenney's or Nesca Bay coffee. Life I will always a one set I guess I'll never have I'll be working for somebody else until I'm in my grave I'll be dreaming of a life of ease and fountains or won't bounce I have a big expensive car drag my first on the ground have a me I can tell to bring me anything everyone will look at me with envy and with grief now revel in their attention and mountains all mountains are thighs sweet lazy life champagne and caviar hope you'll come and find me you know who we are those who deserve the best in life know what our money is worth those who so misfortune is having mountains don't have the hang out there all they tell me still time to save my soul they tell me now I saw counts all those material things you gain by exploiting all the human beings so more than you need this is a dream make you pop up make you clean hold on lonely have it up rearranged brave that's a deep and wide enough for me and all my mountains so thanks oh they tell me still time to save my soul they tell me now I saw counts all those material things you gain by exploiting all the human beings mostly I can hope for me good people are good people are good people are only my stepping stones it's got to take all my mountains and things to serve around me keep all my enemies away keep my sadness I'm no man else I'd be the pipe I'll always I want to guess I'll never have I'll be working for somebody else until I'm in my grave I'll be dreaming of a life of ease and mountains all mountains of that I'll be dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dream dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming that was Tracy Chapman and her song mountains of things and that's something that my guest Devita Johns became very conscious of in the course of her years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Belize in the late 1990s Devita now works for a Quaker Aid group called ProNica folks who partner with groups down in Nicaragua to help meet the fundamental needs of that society I'm your host Mark helps me so now let's return to my spirit in action interview with Devita Johns as she speaks of how her time in Central America influenced her life you said that it changed you in what ways is your life different now than before you made that trip to Nicaragua back in the 1990s I think I look around more at people and see that there are such a variety of cultures that I was pretty much quite comfortable in my life and I knew that the other cultures existed but I wasn't really involved in them when I went to Nicaragua I was the outsider I was the one who stood out I was the one that had to deal with the culture at large so I learned right away what it felt like to be out of my element and when I came back to Florida and worked with Mexican farm workers they're out of their element too you know they don't speak the language they prefer different foods they're used to many people living together we prefer individuality so there's a big cultural divide there and I find all of that real interesting so the big change that I heard you say it happened in your life was you sold your house gave up your security your job went in the Peace Corps how was that experience for you in the Peace Corps was that a net positive or was it particularly challenging for you as a mature woman as opposed to the immature volunteers who are there otherwise the college students the Peace Corps was physically challenging I was in my mid 50s when I was in the Peace Corps and even though I was in pretty good shape and in pretty good shape I had to walk everywhere and carry everything and that was totally different most of us are used to and I am now back back in the States that you know throw everything in the back of the car there's room there so we take everything with us right down there I had to pick and choose what I needed I needed that umbrella I needed that backpack water a book I mean I didn't go anywhere without that stuff water is heavy you know it was physically hard I think culturally and emotionally it was pretty easy because I found it so fascinating but physically it was very hard to just be swept into your clothes had rings on it and sweat again young folks that's a lot easier for them they just pop on out and you know maybe they get a little sunburn but they're not concerned about waiting on the side of the highway for whatever length of time in the sun waiting on the bus but for me that was a real challenge I had to hide under my umbrella to stay out of the sun but I learned you mentioned running into some other volunteers who were in the 50s in the older age brackets what kind of percentage of volunteers is this or is this is this really a very small minority or is it a significant number of volunteers which are not just fresh out of college I think the mature group is about six percent last time I noticed the statistics but I think it's growing because there are a lot of people just like me baby boomers that said okay we've raised our kids we've paid off the mortgage now what and their 60s values are rekindled and I think this is going to be more and more p-score volunteers who are going to be older I saw that trend when I was there another thing about being a mature volunteer in the p-score is that right away we had credibility with the local people instead of being a young college student who may have all this great wonderful training say engineering or something they still don't have any experience and they might be pretty immature whether I had the experience in training or not I was automatically seen as the wise person and the women's groups that I worked with wanted to know what I thought about everything so I think it's probably easier being a volunteer when you're older what was the work that you actually did while you were in the p-score I had the best job of all in the country of Belize I worked for an NGO that worked with groups farmer co-ops and sewing co-ops and cornmeal co-ops and I worked with women's groups all over the country so I was able to travel and worked with every ethnic group so I worked with the Mayans the Mestizo the Garafunas the Creoles the the Mennonites it was wonderful basically I helped them get what they needed if it was training mostly they wanted training in leadership so I would seek funds for that to pay for a speaker to pay for transportation to bring all those people together pay for food you don't have workshops developing countries without food that's what brings people there so there's a lot of organizing just to get to make it happen if I couldn't find a presenter for a workshop then it fell to me to do that so basically I worked with groups it might have been or helping a group of women in a small village organize themselves so that they could sell their sewing showing them how to do basic bookkeeping given them ideas about how to organize themselves if there was training at a chicken co-op obviously I don't know how to raise chickens so I made sure that the person who did know how to do that could go there and talk to them I think to be that you did a typical two year stint in the Peace Corps then you headed back here to Florida did you start working immediately for pronica at that point no I think there was about four years before I started working the pronica after I got back it took I it was a good struggle to come back with this reverse culture shock I lived with two choices of green tea in Belize and not always were they available and I came back here and there's ten feet by six feet of shelf space in the grocery store devoted to green tea and it was difficult plus right afterwards less than a week after I returned was nine eleven and the towers crumbling when you say that it was difficult to have this large selection of tea that you got when you got back to the United States from Nicaragua I have a feeling our listeners will not understand why that would be difficult that's of course just our norm here what was difficult about it and how did you react basically I think is because we have so many choices are we aware how the rest of the world is it just seemed to be a huge imbalance that we would have all of these choices here and not necessarily good for us but it's marketing I mean our society the whole part of our society that you know more is better bigger is better it just doesn't work that way the happiest people I spent two years with in the Peace Corps with those who lived in a doorless windowless hut and slept in hammocks but they were extremely poor by our standards they had the widest teeth they weren't used to eating all this sugar and stuff that we eat they had very good teeth they ate mangoes and limes of course parasites might have been another matter bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, more, more, more, give me, give me, give me, hey, what's it all for? Faster, faster, faster, this is absolutely nuts it's time we learn to say enough is enough we had a week's vacation to take a trip of west we went real fast past everything so we could see the rest we went 10,000 miles but I don't know where we were because when we got back home all I remembered was a blur bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, more, more, give me, give me, give me, hey, what's it all for? Faster, faster, faster, this is absolutely nuts it's time we learn to say enough is enough mama made a pie the best I ever ate she handed me a piece but I took the whole plate my face is turning green I'm gonna lose it bless my soul the whole delicious pie is going down my face is turning green I'm gonna lose it bless my soul the whole delicious pie is I'm gonna lose it bless my soul the whole delicious pie is gonna lose it bless my soul the whole delicious pie is going down my face it's turning green I'm gonna lose it And all their art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, Now I wrote 20 verses into this little song, but every time I sang them all, everybody young one played. I whittled and I fiddled, and I don't remember how I cut it down to four. I hope you let me down, bigger, bigger, bigger, more, more, more, more, more, more, give me, give me, give me, give me, hey, what is going on, more, more, faster, faster, faster, this is absolutely nuts, it's time we learn to say, enough, bigger, bigger, bigger, is by carol johnson, you'll find a link to her website from mine, northernspiritradio.org. I'm your host for this spirit and action visit with Divita Johns, an inspirational woman doing thoughtful and world healing work, who joined the Peace Corps in the mid 50s and works today with Pronika, a Quaker organization offering a helping hand to our brothers and sisters in Nicaragua. Let's return to a very noisy beach on Tampa Bay in Florida, surrounded by birds, children, and more, where I spoke with Divita Johns. The other thing you mentioned that was difficult about your transition here was that the attack on the Twin Towers happened. What was your reaction when you heard saw that? Now of course you've just come from Nicaragua, you've lived with the poor people of the world, poor people certainly compared to us, you lived with poor, relatively happy people. You come back here and you see the attack on Twin Towers, what was your reaction to Divita? My first reaction when I heard and saw it on TV was whoever it was was pretty clever, you know, the day you'd been going after the Goliath sort of thing, they were using our own tools for their goals. That was my first, my totally first reaction, then second was who is it and what's the matter? Nobody else was asking that, everybody else seemed to have their fist raised in the air, let's go get them whoever they are. You know, it was like, well wait a minute, you know, nobody seemed to be asking what it is they wanted and why they were mad and that sort of thing. We just seem to have blinders on here oblivious to the way the rest of the world exist and how they live, how their lives are affected by our choices here in our culture, the choices that we make, because we want to drive big guests because of the rest of these. Well, then we need to claim all that oil, more of our share of the oil and the rest of the world, but yet we want to sell cars to these people, where do we think they're going to get gas to power those cars? Something's going to have to give somewhere and when you've got a whole world out there of the have-nots, they're going to be really mad at the haves. I'm in agreement with you, but I have a feeling that there may be some steps to that that our listeners don't necessarily understand. You said that the first reaction was, gee, that was a clever turnaround of use of technology of our tools, and then you were thinking about why did they do it. I have a feeling most people's reaction first here was the outrage, the hurt, the fear, and evidently you stepped past that, or that wasn't an immediate reaction for you. When you mentioned about going down to Belize to Nicaragua before you mentioned about that of God and everyone, of course there's that of God then using that traditional Quaker phrase, there's that of God in those who were in the Twin Towers who were killed. Why was your reaction to the overseas people first as opposed to the people who were in the Twin Towers? I have a feeling that your reaction was one of compassion towards those who were in the third world, who might have, I guess, masterminded the attack, as opposed to compassion towards those who were in the Twin Towers. Yes, because I think that the lives that they lead are extremely difficult and they don't have to be, and so of course they'd be upset. If there was some inequity come towards me, of course I'm going to feel a little defensive about it. Those people had to be really, really mad for a long, long time to build up that sort of network of people willing to go and do that particular thing. And nobody seemed to even stop to ask who they were, and why, or if they were, they were drowned it out by all of the other people that had their dukes in there. Did you have any conversations with anyone right around that time that were kind of emblematic of the kind of difference between you returning again from the third world to what people were thinking here, people in your own life who had that reaction that was so different than yours? My own family and neighbors and friends, anybody that I was around, and of course then, because of that, I just started hiding. Their take on it was the 25 second sound bite that they were getting off the TV, like, we're at war. Well, I didn't really think it was war, not in my sense of it. I had been scheduled to speak on W&F Radio Women's Show to talk about the Peace Corps, and when all of this happened in 9/11, we postponed it for several weeks. And when I finally showed up, or when we finally rescheduled it, the first question that was posed to me on air was what I thought about 9/11, and I was just so overwhelmed by it, because I was there to speak about the Peace Corps, and the only thing off the top of my head, I was making all the motions that I didn't want to talk about it. So the people on the radio wouldn't hear it, but all I could think of was, you know, was it Gandhi who said an eye for an eye makes everybody blind, and I just could not relate to these people. Everybody, it seemed to me, who should have been sane and sensible and thinking about it, were caught up in the frenzy of being the victim. I still don't understand it. We have caused so much grief in the world, but we're oblivious to that. We just don't get it. I got emails from the people that I knew and believed after it happened, sending their condolences to me and my country. So they had the compassion for us, but we weren't seeing them. Right, definitely. I guess I'll toss in one of my own personal experiences there. Just shortly after 9/11, I was active with the group here in Eau Claire. We were arranging something actually to happen on Halloween, and it was in opposition to going to war, to being involved in war in Afghanistan at that point. And I was interviewed on the TV, and they asked me, well, if we shouldn't go to war, what should we have done? And I said we should have explored other alternatives, including international peace efforts to actually apprehend the criminals as opposed to going to war against the country. That aired on the television station, and the next day at my home there was a message left for me saying that I should have gone up with the Twin Towers because I advocated that. So I can understand your reaction, like, I don't want to talk about that on the radio station because people weren't ready to hear. Is it your sense that people can hear better now? I'm not real sure if they can or not, because the vehemence that people spoke with back right after that happened, that's gone. But they still have that narrow view, that tunnel vision, that somehow or other, we're at war, we're under attack. It's like, no, it's our culture, it's our, what did they do? They took our planes and it hit our financial center. Because it's our financial, you know, our commercialism, our capitalist society that, you know, feels that we can go suck up the world's resources for our own use without fairly compensating people for what they've given up. For instance, they talk about Hurricane Katrina or any disaster that they talk about, the Twin Towers fell down. How do we measure that? It's all in dollars. Well, billions of dollars of damage happened in the hurricane. They don't talk about the number of people who lost how many homes and how long it'll take them to get back and, you know, the kinds of things that I can relate to. I don't relate to billions of dollars, so they're not giving me the information that actually makes it relevant to my life. If you talk about number of people sharing a house with one bathroom, that I can relate to. What kind of items do make up your bottom line? If it's not a dollar bottom line, and probably dollars from measuring there somewhere, what are the things that are important to you that are kind of central in terms of your values? I ask you this, maybe as a Peace Corps volunteer, maybe as a woman, maybe as an employee of ProNica, maybe as a Quaker, whatever the way you measure things, what are the important values that would go into your bottom line? If it's not dollars, because that's always the question, is if we're not going to measure it by the GDP, how are we going to measure it? Well, I think it would come back to the people. How many people are sharing a house with one bathroom? How many children are crammed into a school room? How many of those classrooms don't have books? That would make far more impression on me about some disaster someplace, or some need somewhere. I've been to Nicaragua in Belize, in Guatemala, Mexico. I've seen these classrooms that have nothing on the wall. There are no maps. There are no times tables. There's no alphabet. There are no books. There are no pencils. There are no paper. And yet, there's a school there. How much are those kids learning? We load our kids down with books and stuff and backpacks. We have to put them on wheels. I can't even carry them. There's something really wrong with this. What are those kids learning over there? Well, they're learning a whole lot more than if they weren't going at all. But what exactly are they getting? I would want to know how many people in the community, how many old people are not living with their families? How many young kids, children, don't have insurance? How many kids have never been to the dentist? Those are the kinds of things that I can relate to. It's more of a personal kind of scale rather than a gross national product for a country. That doesn't mean anything to me. Well, let's come back to the work of Proneka because if those are bottom line items that are important to you, then it'd be interesting to know how much Proneka is actually affecting that. Is Proneka doing that for five people, for ten people? What kind of effect is Proneka having? And do you actually hear from the individuals or is it all just statistics? You know, $60,000 or do you see people in that? It'd be wonderful if we had $60,000 to give. Last year we gave about $35,000 to nine different projects. The one that had the most money was $9,000. We're not sole funders for any of the projects. They get funding from other places. But what they get from us is this is what buys food to feed children who live in the dump in the city of Managua. It's the only meal they get a day. That's up to 40 kids who go to that facility. But they live in a dump. They dig through trash. We provide a couple of thousand dollars to a clinic which goes for any sort of pap smears or tuba ligations or any medical treatment for women that come into this particular clinic. Another clinic, Cosima Turner, up in northern Nicaragua, has asked for basic things like to pay the phone bill. They can't operate without a phone bill and it might cost them $600 for a year or for a phone bill. So, you know, they'll ask us for that. We also provide training and education for alternatives for violence. We support schools that do job training for auto mechanics and electrical work. And for a small beautician school, it's teaching former prostitutes how to cut hair. So, they can set a stool up outside where they live and cut people's hair in the broad daylight instead of, you know, their former occupations. You're the stateside coordinator for pronica. And I understand that there's another staff person in Nicaragua. Do you actually get contact with the people? Do you get to hear the stories of the Nicaraguan's or maybe of other volunteers that are going over? Once a year, I go down to Nicaragua for at least a couple of weeks. And once a year, the Nicaraguan coordinator comes up here for at least a couple of weeks. While I'm in Nicaragua, I always visit the project partners in any other board member or committee member or anybody involved with Bronica, who goes down there, goes around to visit as many as possible also. So we see the projects. We've been there. I know what they're like. I know the people who run them. A project partner needs to live up to what they've asked for. They've asked for money to build a bathroom and a school. Well, we want to go there and see it. One of our schools is actually so thrifty buying their materials. They had materials left over to enclose the school room after we gave them money to build a water tank. So, you know, we've been there and we see that. And we've also worked with most of them a long time in their established groups. So we have a good track record with them. How many people, how many children, are you likely to affect with the projects that Bronica is doing? Well, one of them, Los Quenchos, has over 300 kids in their four facilities. They're the ones that they go out and do outreach on the streets, walk around in the streets in Nicaragua, see kids that are sniffing glue and just living on the streets, escaping violence at home, talk them into going in the filter house and if they can stay off glue and they give them the opportunity to go live out on the farm to go to school and be out of Managua, be out of the city. And then as they get older, then they learn skills like hammock making or auto mechanics or electrical work so that when they get old enough, they have a marketable skill. So there's about 300 kids there. There's boys and girls. Girls live in a different facility and they're generally the cousins and sisters of the boys that are in the other facilities. And in the dump, La Cheureka, 30 or 40 kids every day come to this one facility that Quenchos provides a meal for. Those kids live in the dump and they wear clothes they found in the dump and they eat snacks and whatever they find, dig into the trash in the dump. A sad little side story is last year when I went. There were three little kids that had died eating what they thought looked like chocolate. It was actually rat poison that they had found. Just the two weeks before I got there, these three little kids that lived in the dump had died. And in the dump, I had to eat a meal for a long time. And in the dump, I had to eat it. 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And in the dump, I had to eat a meal for a long time. And in the dump, I had to eat a meal for a long time. And in the dump, I had to eat a meal for a long time. And in the dump, I had to eat a meal for a long time. And in the dump, I had to eat a meal for a long time. And in the dump, I had to eat a meal for a long time. And in the dump, I had to eat a meal for a long time. And in the dump, I had to eat a meal for a long time. And in the dump, I had to eat a meal for a long time. And directly, there are the children of the mothers who are in the haircutting school. Those are kids that are going to benefit because their mothers are going to have jobs and a steady income so that they can now go to school. School is technically free, except they have to pay teacher salaries, they have to pay uniforms, they need shoes that are closed, papers and pencils to write. They have to pay all of those things. With a new government that was elected last November, there is hope that the schools would get more government support and funding. But up to this point, the government didn't even pay the teacher salaries. The government didn't pay the teacher salaries. What was the government doing in terms of its priorities? Well, I'm not real sure what they were doing. The one school we work with, Martin Luther King School, for instance, the government official came around and said, "Well, you need to do XYZ so you'll be authorized to give out a diploma when you finish." It would be sort of like our middle schools here. And they looked at them and laughed and said, "Why should we do that? You're not giving us any support. Why should we have to do what you've asked for?" But they realized if they want their students to be able to advance beyond that school, they had to do that. But no, the families of the students who, particularly if they come from these poor neighborhoods, it's a huge burden on the families to put kids through school. And that's why, in Nicaragua, back in the mid-80s, there was this very high literacy rate. It's like something like 80%, 85%. Because the Sandinista government had this "Each One Teach One" program that the kids that were in the cities and had gone to school, when I lived in the villages for several months at a time, and would teach classes, teach people out in the villages to read and write. So literacy rates were really high back then, and now they've just plummeted way down to, I think it's below 40%, which is pathetic. We have a country of people where the largest percentage of the population is under 18, and they can't read. They have no prospects for a job. What kind of a society is that going to be? You've mentioned so far, Divita, that you're a stateside coordinator, and there's a paid person who works in Nicaragua. What's the rest of the organization that constitutes ProNica? Besides the Nicaragua and the stateside coordinator, ProNica is run by volunteers. All of our board and committee members are volunteers, and we have volunteers that go to Nicaragua for six months to a year, and we coordinate their placement, get housing in a job for them, based on their interest and the needs of our project partners. If we have a volunteer who has a skill that we can't accommodate, we find a place for them, such as last year we had an OBGYN getting ready to go to her last year of training, and she took a year off to go down to Nicaragua, and she worked in a custom attorney in Estelle. Well, it was one that's new to us, but we had heard about them, and we placed her there, and she lived there for six months and was just, you know, a year, and was just thrilled. They were thrilled to have her. She spoke excellent Spanish. It's very good for our volunteers. There is very little English in Nicaragua, so volunteers need to be fluent in Spanish, but we have volunteers that will work. Now we have one who is doing a water project. He graduated last year as an engineer, and he's been helping design and install water projects in small villages that had no water. They had a community well, and everyone from their home went to the well and drew water and walked it back to their house, so they've been digging trenches and laying PVC pipe. It's easy now to put water in developing countries with PVC pipe. We've had volunteers that have worked in libraries with the Los Quincios. We've had volunteers that have taught in schools, volunteers that have worked in legal social issues, land disputes. We had a volunteer who was a legal aide and wanted to work. We had an issue where a farmer that had been cultivating his land for 20 years, and the farmer owner who fled the country way back came back and was intimidating all the people to sell their land back to him for pennies on the dollar. And we had one who said no, he wasn't going to do that. That was his land fair and square, and he wasn't going to give it up. It's cost him and his family a lot of time in legal work going back and forth from the highlands down to Menagua to go stand in line in court to see some judge that might make him just come back later. It's been really sad. You can read about that on our website, the Vincent Padilla story. And that website is pronica.org, p-r-o-n-i-c-a.org. Divita, these volunteers, do they have to be Quakers or what is their makeup? Are they all Quakers in general? No, not really. We ask them to understand and live by Quaker values, which is pretty simple, basically. It's just to accept that of God in everyone, accept everyone. We don't proselytize. We don't try to push ourselves on other peoples. No one has to come to a Quaker meeting to be a part of either as a volunteer or a project partner. We just live our values. Volunteers come from all walks of life and all age groups. They might be young right out of college. We have even had some high school volunteers over the summer, but these were people who had been there before with their parents and were well familiar with the location, the project, and pronica. But basically they're adults. And then we had a volunteer who was in her 50s. She was there for six months. We also have the Quaker House in Menagua, which is a travel guest house for people passing through Menagua. Any of our volunteers, of course, can stay there. Any traveler can stay there for ten dollars a night. It's dormitory-style. Then there's Quaker literature and library and there's meeting room, a space, facilities to do laundry. So a lot of people who volunteer in the country for other groups, witness for peace or whoever, might come and stay in the Quaker House for a week or a long weekend or something just for downtime to sort of regroup or if they have business in Menagua. Are you still fighting U.S. government opposition to help for Nicaragua? Is that all along in the past? Hasn't been that sort of direct stuff. Last November when Daniel Ortega was running though, the U.S. Ambassador down there was making all sorts of noises, i.e. threats, to remind people in Nicaragua that, you know, the U.S. government would be happy to work with the new government, the new right government, the correct one, the one that the U.S. approved of. I happened to be down there just days after the election and I thought it was really interesting to see that the election results, it took two days to come in and they came in while I was there. Everybody was just sort of, the whole country seemed to be holding their breath because they had all voted, fair and square. I mean, the Carter Center, everybody was down there observing the elections and they said they were cleaner than they are here in Florida. Let's doubt about how they were run. But all of Nicaragua seemed to be holding their breath waiting for their results. And then when the results did come out, instead of wild, crazy celebrations, they were just sort of like, "Ooh, what have we done now?" sort of thing. But everybody really, very proud of themselves for voting just the way they were wanting to get back. For 20 years they had followed the U.S. supported government and done it that way, and there hadn't been any improvement since it had gotten worse. With the International Development Bank and Fund and all of those things, the international community has put all sorts of restrictions on and we'll give you this money, but you've got to cut back social services. Well, this is part of that government speak that I was mentioning before. What is gross national product? That doesn't mean anything. What it meant when they said they cut back social services was that they closed clinics. They shut down schools. There are no ambulances. It doesn't make any sense in a country where people are so poor already anyway to cut out the sorts of services, but that's what they did. And that's why there's 2,000 people who live in the Managua city dump. They can do the trash that gets dumped there every day. That election happened some four months ago. Are there concrete changes? Are things going to be better for Nicaraguaans? And does it facilitate the work of pronica that this election happened? It hasn't made really any difference in the way we work as far as reporting procedures or anything like that. What it has done, I think, has created a lot of hope. There's a lot of hope amongst our project partners that they will have government support and maybe even some funds someday, but since the November elections or TEGA seems to be trying to walk a fine line to not antagonize the U.S. government because everybody knows, everybody's fearful of what that could cause. But he has been accepting of Hugo Chavez's offers of assistance with oil and fuel and that sort of thing. And Cuba's offers for doctors. But I believe that, you know, it's still to be seen how it will be. Pronica will keep working, that there will be a need down there for a time to come. I want to bring the circle back to you one more time. Davida, it just occurred to me that there's some other portions of your past that I haven't asked you about. And does this represent a major transition from the way that you originally believed? Because for me, it's always a question of how do people come to give their lives to good work in the world? Why did they do that when they really could be comfortable computer programmers? I was about seven and my daddy was digging a hole for a septic tank where we lived up in North Georgia and I took off my shirt and jumped down in there to help him. He was shirtless in the hole too, but I was told I had to go in and put a shirt on my flat chest. I think that might have been the beginning of my looking around and saying, "This doesn't make sense." I began questioning things at a very early age. And I still question and I probably always will because I just don't believe in the status quo. Just because something was always done that way doesn't mean it's still valid today. I came to Quaker Meeting back in the late 80s with a neighbor who I had just been curious and we'd been talking about it, but when I walked into Quaker Meeting, I knew six people there already that I had known from other peace and social justice projects that I'd worked on either with photography or whatever. Food or radiation plants are the green issues, environmental issues. And the more I learn about Quakers, the more I believe it is truly the way I'll spend the rest of my life because I realize that I'm one person. I can do the best that I can. I can't solve all the world's problems, but I'm in a place that I feel I can make the most good. If I can keep ProNica organized, all those different volunteers and when they're available to come to meetings and make decisions and to actually get the checks written and get them down there. If I can do that part of it, which is the computer programmer, the logical, analytical, the organizer part of me, that's where my skill lies. Two years in the Peace Corps, I realized, nope, I can't do that. It's too hard. I'm too old for that. But I can do this work here and make it possible for the work in Nicaragua to happen. Has it been hard for you to sit here for this interview for much of an hour right here facing on Tampa Bay? I mean, did you want to get up and chase the seagulls and go play with the kids that are in the park here? Well, of course. Good wind blowing. I've got my kite. Let's go get that. Well, maybe we better end the interview then. So we can go fly a kite. Thanks so much to Vida for your work, for your time. And for facilitating the reason that I'm here, which is the friendly folk dancer tour down here, you make such a difference in Nicaragua and in the United States. Well, I hope so. I appreciate you having the opportunity to talk about ProNica and share that with your listeners. You've been listening to a spirit and action interview with Divita Johns, a stateside coordinator with ProNica, a Quaker group working to provide resources and improve conditions, working in partnership with groups in Nicaragua. Their website is P-R-O-N-I-C-A dot O-R-G. But you can easily get that from my website, NorthernSpiritRadio.org, where you can track down the music featured in this show and listen to this and other Northern Spirit radio programs. The theme music for spirit and action is "I Have No Hands But Yours" by Carol Johnson. Thank you for listening. I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. You can email me at helpsmeet@usa.net. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. I have no higher call for you than this. To love and serve your neighbor. Enjoying selflessness. To love and serve your neighbor. Enjoying selflessness. [Music]