A Not So Boring Life

In 1984 I was living and working in a rural farming cooperative in the north central mountains of Nicaragua.    I had been at the cooperative for a few months, contributing what I could through manual labor while I documented the lives of its members.  On this day, I hitched a ride into the nearby city of Esteli.  I arrived in town around 10 a.m.  Walking from the main highway up to the town center town where I hoped to meet up with some other North Americans, perhaps pick up some mail and later have an inexpensive restaurant meal before heading back out to the cooperative, I came abreast of the town’s post office where, unusually, there was a large crowd gathered in the lobby, spilling out into the cobblestone street.  Inquiring, I found that word had come that a group of 20 to 25 young postal workers who had left a few days earlier for a stint of coffee picking in the nearby mountains (a semi-voluntary practice of government workers to assist in the recollection of the all-importan

“P-O-OLLLLKA! I WANT POLKA!”   Aw, what’s he yellin’ about now?   Whadya want, Joe? Polkapolkapolka!   Sheesh!” Joe and Marshall were the best of friends.   Both men were born with cerebral palsy.   The speech of both was often difficult to understand.   Both suffered from spastic quadriplegia and had little control of their arms and legs.   Both had been confined to wheelchairs from the time they were children to their current age of around 60 years.   They had been interned in an institution for their entire lives.   For most of that life, their home was what was known as a “warehouse” – a large, government-run rural asylum where they were day-after-day lifted by underpaid direct-care workers from bed to wheelchair, showered, fed, wheeled to the same place in front of a window and, at the end of the day, returned to their beds – a routine that seldom varied.   Their mental development, already challenged by the cognitive impairment caused by the palsy, was further imp