Hey Friends,

Another note about fruit. This time it’s mangos. I can tell it’s mango season without stepping outside my room. My room is a walled-off corner of the dormitory where the men stay who come to Ebenezer farm for workshops in livestock raising (goats, chickens, rabbits) and organic agriculture. The dormitory is on the second floor, above the dining room and lecture hall and right below a tin roof. Tin roofs have numerous advantages compared to other materials—they are light, easy to install, and relatively easy to repair. But tin roofs also have disadvantages, one of which is clearly audible during mango season. As the mangos ripen, they begin to fall with any bit of breeze. So, when I’m sleeping at night…bam! Instantly awake even from the soundest sleep, my heart races. Bomb? Gun? Firerocket? Juvenile delinquent? No. Just the mango tree next to our second floor porch. You might think that this is not a common problem, but I had the same situation in Haiti. The thing is, besides providing excellent fruit, mango trees give abundant shade, which seriously improves quality of life. Tolerating a mango-sized war zone for a month or so every year is definitely worth the pay-back.

For those of you unfortunate enough never to have tasted a good mango, mangos are yellow to reddish-yellow on the outside and the color of a good ripe cling peach on the inside. The texture of mango is also something like a peach. The flavor is some heavenly combination of peach, pear and plum. If you have a really good imagination, maybe that description helps you. Obviously the best thing for you to do is to get hold of a sun-ripened mango and try it out. But that is a little difficult. Sometimes supermarkets in the U.S. will carry mangos in the fruit section. But they’re not always good examples of a real mango. I’ve eaten thousands of mangos over the last 10 or 15 years. If it’s hard for me to help you know what a mango is all about, imagine how difficult it for me to explain all the rest of life here in Nicaragua and here at Ebenezer Farm. Many of the things I see and hear I still don’t understand. Yet I am convinced that part of my ministry is to challenge you all to share with me the realities of Nicaragua.

Some of my friends in Managua work with visiting North Americans everyday, helping them of understand what Nicaragua is all about. Most North Americans who come here on short-term mission trips have a real desire to learn, and many of the questions they ask are useful and even profound. But the questions can also get tedious: What tree is that? And that one? What bird is that? Who are those people? A friend who works full-time with visitors tells about someone who once asked her, "This morning a woman in a red dress walked by our house. Where was she going?" The questions do get silly sometimes. In general, though, people are trying to figure out how to fit into this new world, and that’s all right. When we leave the United States, we are leaving behind one world and entering an entirely new one—new language, new faces, new ways of living, and a new environment. It’s not easy for anyone, although those of us who live here have had time to rebuild our frames of reference. North Americans from a homogeneous environment in the States have to work really hard, I think, to feel comfortable in their six or seven days here in Nicaragua. I am impressed that sometimes they actually seem to succeed.

I remember when my father and mother visited me in the Dominican Republic, my father commented on things he saw that reminded him of when he was a child, for example, the many shoeshine boys. Even the smallest town has its cadre of young boys with their wood boxes, big enough for their polish, brush and rags on the inside and long enough for an average size foot to put itself on top. Some of the boys carry an empty can of mackerel or a very small wooden stool to sit on as they shine. It’s something that’s mostly disappeared in the States, but it is still very common in the Dominican Republic, in Haiti, and here in Nicaragua. In a way, what Dad was doing was a kind of a "trick" to make the world he was experiencing more familiar, less ominous. There are many ways to go about it, but that’s the point—to bring the world we carry in our head and the world we are experiencing around us as close together as possible, to bring the people around us out of the dark world of the unknown into a world of fully human fellow human beings. Christ recommended that we love our neighbor as we love ourselves. In the context of experiencing a new country, the first step is to move from seeing "strangers," to seeing "neighbors, " people we know or could know. In Spanish, the word used in the New Testament is "projimo," which means "neighbor," but it also means "fellow being." Once we can look at everyone as a "fellow being," the next step would be to stop seeing another fellow being and start seeing ourselves. If we can look at anyone and see ourselves looking out of their eyes, then we’re bound to start treating them with a little more care.

Well, that’s the latest fruit news from Nicaragua. I’ll let my comments "ripen" for a bit and then maybe I’ll share some more.

God’s Peace.

Mark A. Hare
Mission Volunteer, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
Specialist in Environmental Education and Agroforestry

The 2001 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 251