Why I finally started following the news again after 20 years.

Posted on by Leontien Reedijk

   MY (R)EVOLUTION, PART 3.

For 20 years I’ve stayed away from the news. At first it was by force, because I was travelling in Asia in times long before internet was omnipresent, when finding a newspaper in a language I could read was rare, and internet-cafés were sparse.

During my travels I started volunteering on remote farms or in small villages, renting a simple house. I haven’t lived in a house with TV for almost 20 years now.

By default, I stopped keeping up with the news, and pretty soon I was completely out of the habit of trying to find out what’s going on in the world.

I actually found it a relief not following the news. I had more time to do other things, and I felt over-all happier. News is mostly bad news, and it always makes me feel upset, sad, angry, powerless, frustrated or shocked. It is also mostly news that I cannot do much about, since it happens far from where I live, now already for 13 years on this tiny speck of land in the Caribbean Sea.

For years of my life I had let the news drain my energy, when I was younger. Once I discovered how much better I felt when I didn’t know all that news, without ever feeling that not knowing what’s going on in the world threatened my well-being or my life, I made it a point of not keeping up with it, period.

When on April 19 of this year protests against a change in the social security system here in Nicaragua resulted in hundreds of injured and dozens of dead people thanks to police violence, I was still in the “I don’t want to know this”-mode.

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I Saw it Coming.

Posted on by Leontien Reedijk

My (R)evolution, part 2.

Since April 19 of this year, there is political upheaval going on in Nicaragua,

the country that I have called home since 2005. What’s happening isn’t pretty, and it doesn’t seem that the situation is going to be solved anytime soon: the people of Nicaragua have—quite suddenly—stood up against their president, Daniel Ortega, and his wife, vice-president Rosario Murillo.

I can’t say I have openly announced it, but over the past few years I have regularly wondered when something would finally spark this fiery nation back into their old mode of standing up for their rights. Last century they fought a 28 year civil war to overthrow the dictatorship of the Somoza family. Nicaraguans showed then a drive for freedom and equality to reckon with. Men and women didn’t give up in their fight for democracy, and won.

In 2006 Daniel Ortega was elected president. In 2011 he was re-elected. Then he single-handedly changed the constitution so that he could be re-elected until his death.

I happened to be in the capital, Managua, in the weeks prior to the last elections in 2016. In the city, shared taxis are the most used means of “public” transport. They are a great way to engage in conversations with the local population.

On one taxi-ride I asked the driver when exactly the elections were scheduled. He shrugged his shoulders…,

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When the rug gets pulled out from underneath your feet.

Posted on by Leontien Reedijk

My (R)evolution, part 1.

That rug is just a metaphor, because I live in a place that isn’t really fit for rugs. In the tropics, we don’t have rugs. Door mats maybe, but no rugs.

Since 2005 I call Little Corn Island my home base. It’s a tiny tropical island off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Turquoise seas, white sandy beaches, waving palm trees, my own little yoga and massage studio set in a lush garden right next to my tiny but super-comfortable home.

Of course, now you all think I’m living the dream. Well, maybe I was. Until April 19 of this year. Now I’m living in what some of you would more likely call a nightmare. A friend of mine described it as “living on the edge”. Whichever way you want to label it, when the country you’re living in as a foreign entrepeneur throws itself into a revolution, you cannot help but feel as if the rug got pulled out from underneath your feet.

From one day to the next the Nicaragua people woke up from peacefully dozing to fiercely demanding that the president and his wife step down. In a month’s time more than 70 people have found their death and hundreds have been injured in riots caused by police violence and looting. Road blocks are disabling proper transport, due to which many regions (amongst which our little island) are cut off from their regular supplies of food and fuel.

 

Continue reading “When the rug gets pulled out from underneath your feet.” →