Visit to a popular market - Yorlis Luna speaks about the realities of Nicaragua today
NSCAG News |
on: Friday, 13 August 2021
A popular market in Nicaragua
The following is an article by Yorlis Luna, published in Tortilla con Sal on 11 August:-
"Going to the popular market in the Pacific of Nicaragua is to feel the immense strength of Nicaragua at all times and see the living reality that disrupts beyond the lies that the mass media of disinformation tell about Nicaragua. I go to the market and I see the shelves full of vegetables, fresh and local fruits, I ask for some gingers and the young woman says to me with great pride: "They are from today, today they cut them ... smell them, they are fresh!".
What pride, when in the world it is a luxury to consume fresh and local products, Nicaragua is full of healthy food and with a popular identity. I keep walking and a vegetable seller very kindly tells me “how cute your child, it's true that children are cute, you have to take care of him… note that things are not the same as before, where I have not walked… … true that yes life has changed ”. Those words touched my heart, working people know that things have changed during all these 14 years.
But how not to feel the change if here is a country where citizen security has grown every year, here you live in peace, you can come and go without fear, without the ghost of fear that they rob you or your children, that they extort money from you. or require participation in a gang or mara. You breathe tranquility, joy, noise, sweat and work in peace, a reality that is a distant dream for the popular classes in other Central American countries. Here, where the popular economy is strengthened with the management of a state that guarantees not only public safety, but also that health, education and recreation are not a privilege for the few.
They say that the eyes are the mirrors of the soul and in the eyes of the people in the municipal market to be able to see how tenderness, rudeness, joy, hope and dignity throb, it may be because there in the narrow streets of that market ancestral hides the rebellious soul of the people. When in the world there is a continuous war of the powerful classes against the poor people, here in Nicaragua of a thousand battles, the fight is against the structural poverty inherited by colonial and neocolonial looting, it is against the arrogance of the powerful classes within and out of the country.
What pride to live in this country, where the peasant hands, wrinkled and tired, the typical apron of the merchant women with black, mestizo and indigenous faces and their happy proclamations announce that resistance to class hatred continues. For a small country to deign to build its history and respond to empires is not arrogance, rather it is honoring the blood shed for many centuries and embracing our roots. I walk and walk in the popular market, there in the faces of women, youth and adults, families continue to work, dream and build a better future. Despite what they say outside, here is another Nicaragua."
Yorlis Luna - Mathematician, popular educator, agroecologist, and researcher. PhD candidate in Ecology and Sustainable Development at the Colegio de la Frontera Sur, ECOSUR, Mexico.
