First Person – Hatikvah in the Village

If someone had turned on the radio in Mulukuku, Nicaragua, on May 28, 2005, they would have heard “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem. There is no Jewish community in this village of 7,000. In fact, there is not normally even a single Jew. But for one week at the end of May, there were 14 of us.

Our group was in the most impoverished region of Nicaragua as part of a joint project between The Jewish Federation and American Jewish World Service. The goal: to help alleviate poverty, hunger and disease among all the people of the world. It was an imperative that I took very seriously, and one that compelled me to step out of my Los Angeles life of privilege and material comfort into a world where those two terms are largely devoid of meaning.

Arriving in Mulukuku shocked my system in every conceivable way. It was swelteringly hot. There was no running water, only a well for drinking and cooking, buckets of rainwater for bathing, and a river for laundry. The sole means of garbage disposal was burning — a method we soon discovered was as dangerous as it was primitive, when one of the villagers was scorched by a combustible piece of plastic.

We drove five hours from the country’s capital. As I emerged, hot and sweaty, I felt a surge of adrenaline, of power. I was here to help, and, clearly, I thought, my help was desperately needed.

I was soon to find out how wrong I was.

Our group was hosted by Cooperativa Maria Luisa Ortiz, a grass-roots endeavor providing free health services, legal aid and domestic violence shelter to the community’s women and children. In a society where girls typically get pregnant at age 14, where spousal abuse is commonplace and where the resources to deal with these issues are scarce, the Cooperativa is a bastion of support.

Our volunteer work was to consist of two projects: the smaller, to paint several rooms in the compound and rustproof a security fence; the larger, to fortify the retaining walls of the clinic’s herbal medicine garden in order to prevent the plant beds from collapsing.

I was excited, enthusiastic to finally put to practice my belief in healing the world — with my own two hands. On some days, the work was near backbreaking. But more troubling than my physical exhaustion was a nagging sense that the people benefiting most from our work were not the villagers themselves, but us, the volunteers.

The first day in the garden, the agronomist instructed us how to properly dig a trench to accommodate a row of large concrete slabs that needed to be erected. Because we were used to working with our minds, and not our hands, we did it wrong.

By day two, we had mastered the task, but worked constantly under the guidance of the locals, who were experts in agriculture, but simply lacked the manpower to do the work as quickly. As I dug into the parched soil with the edge of my spade, I felt myself chipping away at all the stereotypes I held of the developing world.

I went to Nicaragua thinking I could make a difference in the lives of those I met. I like to think that, in some way, I did. But now I know that the major transformation this trip sparked was not in the villagers, but in myself.

I joined this mission because I had an innate sense of obligation. Before I left, the people of Mulukuku were the faceless recipients of my personal need to foster social justice. Soon, though, I learned people’s names, heard their laughter, looked into their eyes. Natalie has beautiful, precocious twin daughters. Michael has the curious, adventurous spirit of a child. Noel has the charisma of a politician. That’s when I realized — poverty is not the face of a stranger, but the face of a friend.

Now that I am back in Los Angeles, I feel a new sense of obligation to help others personalize a typically anonymous epidemic, to see themselves reflected in the eyes of someone less fortunate.

On May 28, 2005, our group was invited to appear on Mulukuku’s sole radio station. The host asked us to choose several songs to sing. Without hesitation, we included “Hatikvah.” We were all proud that our Jewish values had led us to this village, had motivated us to look beyond ourselves, had instilled in us a sense of moral duty. As our voices rang out through the static of radios all over the village, I thought of the likelihood that the Israeli national anthem be broadcast in Nicaragua, and smiled. Anything is possible.

Keren Markuze is a television writer and producer in Los Angeles.