Adios Nicaragua
At 5 am it’s still dark as Ivan drives us to the airport. Inside the van no one is talking and outside groups of people out for a bit of exercise walk briskly along the median of the almost-emtpy divided highway and sometimes spill out into the fast lane.
In the departure lounge I try to spot a tourist but everyone seems to be from either an NGO or a church group and most sound like they’re American. The in-flight movie stars Jennifer Aniston and takes place in Seattle, but suddenly Jennifer is having a conversation with her leading man in front of the Water Street Café, which is across the street from my office in Vancouver. In another part of the movie one of the characters finds redemption at a Home Depot which could be anywhere except perhaps Nicaragua. I’m glad that culture shock is being dulled by the fogginess of my sleep-deprived brain.
At my daughter’s place in L.A. I pull out the comal I bought from Benita back on Day 2 and test it out on the gas stove. The tortillas are delicious and I vow never to eat store-bought again. When I get back to Vancouver I put some of the pottery I brought back into the display case outside the communal studio where I work on weekends and every time I look at them I fall in love again with the soft, warm, welcoming beauty of my Nicaraguan pots.
This was first posted at geist.com.
We headed back to Managua today and on the way we stopped at the 
Fred has another pet project, besides Potters for Peace, and that’s a group called 
Today we took in a townful of potters at San Juan de Oriente, a place where every street is lined with pottery shops and every nook and cranny contains studios, both large and small. The style of pottery here is the most well-known and, in some ways, the most sophisticated in the country: pots are decorated with brightly-coloured slips (that are coloured with oxides) and burnished until they are completely smooth and shiny so that they look as if they have been glazed. Unlike pottery that has been decorated with naturally-occurring coloured clays, pottery decorated with oxide-coloured clay is not food safe.
Duillio Jimenez and his wife Paola run a store and studio in San Juan de Oriente. The store is at street level and the studio, which includes the kiln in the photo above, is in the basement. Duillio demonstrated how he chips away the burnished slip to reveal the natural clay (see photo on above right) and then he got his young son, Duillio Junior, to demonstrate his impressive competence on the wheel. Since a woman taught Duillio how to throw and he taught his son, they both throw with both feet on the same side of the wheel, similar to riding sidesaddle on a horse — since most Nicaraguan women wear skirts, this position works better for them.
Then it was on to the wind-swept tourist attraction at Laguna de Masaya, one of many crater lakes in Nicaragua, a land of volcanoes. More souvenir shopping was available here but we preferred to look out over the lagoon and to to avoid getting blown down the hill. A couple of us took refuge from the wind in a little coffee shop (that had great coffee) and Chris bought a large (2 1/2-foot in diameter) flat basket that, despite our dire predictions and rolled eyes, she did manage to get back to the States.
Drove from there out to the Monkey Hut at Laguna de Apoyo, along winding roads that are lined with plant nurseries. The Monkey Hut is a youth hostel (but they let us old folks in anyway) perched above a huge warm crater lake, in the midst of large waterfront homes. We spent the rest of the afternoon swimming, drinking beer and laying about in hammocks, then we cooked our own dinner and went to be early. The Monkey Hut is picturesque but I was missing the “real” countryside so I slept outside on the deck.
Spent the day at Loma Panda, a remote pottery in the mountains, near the border with Honduras. This pottery is run by five sisters (and a niece) whose family has lived there for 500 years and despite their remote location, the pottery is well-established and the work done there is some of the most innovative in Nicaragua. The sisters have clay available on their land and buyers come to buy directly from them. During the contra war, the sisters say that they were not in danger (the contras came over the border from Honduras) because they “just went into the hills.”
The day started with a buying spree as we all tried to visualize the size of our suitcases and the amount of pottery we had already bought — the pottery at Loma Panda was so exuberant and whimsical and beautiful that we all wanted to own many more pieces than we would be able to carry home. The story goes that several years ago a couple of the sisters were taken on a trip to Managua where they saw plastic dolls with movable limbs (the kind where the arms and legs are attached to each other by elastic bands running through the hollow body) and when they came back they began to make clay dolls like this — using underwear elastic to hold the moveable limbs on. This is the only resemblance their work has to pink plastic: they create crazy dolls, creatures and other forms and decorate them with coloured slip, sometimes incised them with intricate patterns, and then burnish them smooth.
Lunch was another delicious chicken stew, served in the main room of the house with chickens and cats running underfoot. At some point in the day, Mike remembered that it was his 60th birthday and we all agreed that we couldn’t think of a better way to spend it. When our visit was over some of us walked down the rocky road and waited at the bottom in the coolness of the shady riverbed, while the rest of us rode down in the back of the truck and picked up a couple of young guys who jumped on, eager to catch a free ride.
Nearer to town we stopped at the home of Maria, a tiny woman who makes the cutest piggy banks in Nicaragua. She lives with her sister, Marta, in the house that their father built and she makes 4 piggy banks a day. She used to fire them, one at a time, inside her cookstove (which is inside her house) until Potters for Peace built her a small barrel kiln just outside her door. Now she can fire 11 piggy banks at a time. Her other jobs are farming and praying for the dead. Her sister Marta was not at home when we visited, but as we drove down the road we passed her walking home with a load of sticks (firewood) on her back.
Robert and I spent the evening in the lobby, hunched over his laptop, putting together the text and image for our group t-shirt. Found a triumphant photo of the whole gang clustered around the kiln we had built (it seemed ages ago) but then someone pointed out that two people were missing from the shot. Photoshop came to the rescue and we were able to “place” two more people in the photo and then we added our group name, “Momotombito Caliente,” (after the volcano that the kiln we built most closely resembled) which we had chosen by secret ballot (!) after many long and rambling discussions. The next day Robert sent the final computer file back to Managua (where a perspicacious employee at the printing house picked up a major spelling mistake) so that the printed t-shirts would be waiting for us there on our last night.
Spent most of days 8 and 9 at Santa Rosa, one of the few remaining collectives in Nicaragua. The land belonging to the collective was originally a privately-owned hacienda. When the owners fled during the revolution, the people who had been working for them moved onto the land and set up the collective and then persisted, despite several changes in government and political ideologies, in gaining title to the land. Each family in the collective is allotted land to live and work on and if they do not maintain their home or their land they are evicted.
After introductions we were invited to help unload the new kiln which had been built by Potters for Peace thanks to a generous donation of $600 from one of our brigade members who shyly accepted their thanks. We were glad to help, although later, when we knew each other better, Consuelo confessed that, although they had planned the firing so that we would be there for the unloading, a buyer had turned up early so they had to unload it without us and then, so that we wouldn’t be disappointed, they put most of the pots back. I could see by the huge change and expansion in the work being produced at Santa Rosa that Consuelo had taken full advantage of the opportunity to learn from the other potters that she met on the brigade last year.
On the way to Santa Rosa on our second day, we stopped in at a filter and brick factory that is run by a fellow named Tito, who is part of a family that, before the revolution, were wealthy landowners. Tito’s family now lives in Mexico but he has returned to Nicaragua to try to regain title to some of their lands (land title in Nicaragua is incredibly complex due to the revolution and other changes in government). At the filter and brick factory Tito employs many young men, most of whom are university students. Tile-making is monotonous and sometimes back-breaking work but the workers take turns at each job so they don’t wear themselves out. Some of the men have become competent throwers and the factory also produces a line of flower pots.
This morning we “borrowed” the kitchen of the comidor where we have been eating and four of our bravest brigadistas cooked breakfast for us using a traditional Nicaraguan wood stove: a long, narrow firebox that is fed with long branches at the end of which are a couple of holes to put pots onto the direct flame. I wasn’t part of this adventure but I heard that all would have been lost without the help of Maritza, our native Nicaraguan brigadista.
The final product was delicious but it took a little longer (okay, a lot longer) to prepare than we had anticipated, which gave the rest of us time to walk the streets of San Juan de Limay and watch people starting their day: collecting tortillas for their breakfast, sweeping their doorsteps and the street in front of their houses, sitting outside their front doors looking at us as we looked at them, and, in the case of the dogs, sleeping in the middle of the road.
On our way to La Naranja pottery, we passed another gordita, this one holding a djembe, an African drum that was introduced to Nicaragua by a potter from Africa and has since become known to gringos who are not as well-informed as we are, as a “traditional Nicaraguan drum.” La Naranja is a family-run pottery that you get to by takinga short drive from San Juan de Limay and a longer walk down a steep and rocky road. We pulled several mysterious and heavy metal pieces from the back of the van and lugged them down the hill and they turned out to be the parts for an 
We hung out at La Naranja for the rest of the morning playing with the extruder (Maritza gave a demo of an extruded boat that she had learned how to make at a Potters for Peace workshop last year), sharing pottery techniques and buying pottery pieces that we would later stuff into the space left by the extruder parts and then we said goodbye and walked back up the long, hot hill.
In the afternoon we visited the pottery at El Calero, a pueblo that was created to house people who survived when Hurrican Mitch wiped out their previous pueblo, 
Later, on a winding road through the mountains we encountered the first of a series of stone statues of 
Spent the afternoon at the home and studio of the stone carver Oscar Casco where we learned to carve marmolina (soapstone) using first a machete and then finer instruments. Oscar put both his studio and his workers at our disposal and some of us managed, with a lot of help, to end up with carvings.
The pots are fired again, this time in a smokey atmosphere so that the clay that has not been covered with slip turns a dark brown, while the clay that has been protected by the slip remains a browny-orange colour. When the pots are cool, the slip is washed off so that the unsmoked decoration is revealed, and then scraffito lines are added.
We spent the day trying to master the art of painting thick slip with a chicken feather and then scratching outlines around the decorations using a spoke from a bicycle wheel. Meanwhile, the Ducuale potters put up with us getting underfoot while they carried on burnishing their own pots, smoking our pots, selling pots to a busload of gringos, and even cooking us a delicious chicken stew for lunch.
Slabs, textures, buttons: I saw it on my TV!
slab-built mugs
My daughter-in-law loves the bluish mug on the right and I know this because she wrote me a note saying that if she had made a mug like this she would write a blog post about it, so that’s what I’m doing. This is a new design for me (I usually throw my mugs) and it was inspired by the excellent DVD set (which I will review in a later post) called What If? Explorations with Texture and Soft Slabs by Sandi Pierantozzi. Sandi encourages us to 1) play with soft, thin slabs and with texture, and 2) ask ourselves “what if I try this?” so that’s what I did. I started by making straight-sided mugs and added buttons where the slab joined. Then I watched a bit more of the DVD and saw how Sandi pushes a straight side out to form a curve. So I did that too. Apart from being a lot of fun, this technique allows me to make ultra-thin mugs which is something that is appreciated by a friend of mine who has a disability. One thing that I like about these mugs is that they don’t look anything like Sandi’s work, even though they were inspired by it. You can see excerpts from the DVD set (and even buy it) at ceramicartsdaily.org.