Big White Horses and Little White Rabbits – The Beginnings of Numana, Part 3

By Rick McNary

 

The Lone Ranger was my hero.  “Hi-Ho, Silver, Away” he would cry and Silver (who was actually white) would rear up and off they would ride into the sunset having just triumphed over some injustice: usually a damsel in distress.  He would leave behind the fabled silver bullet and people wondering, “Who was that masked man?”  All of this was done in thirty minutes on black and white t.v.  And I never understood why he was called, “The Lone Ranger” when he always had Tonto just around the corner to help him out.

 

I wanted to be like the Long Ranger when I was a kid. Silver wasn’t available so my next option was a golden palomino mare named Clipper. I’d saddle her up and saunter off into Kansas pastures looking for someone to rescue, preferably a cute damsel in distress.  I never found any.  A couple of old farmer’s wives down the road didn’t count.  And saying, “Hi-Ho, Cipper! Away!” just didn’t have the same ring to it.  Furthermore, to make things worse, all I had was a bb gun.  No silver bullet. I did my shows in color, though.

 

T. V. cowboys were my heroes.  What do you expect out of a kid that grew up on the prairies of Kansas?  John Wayne. Roy Rogers. Randolph Scott.  I know a lot of real cowboys, too, and I gotta admit, when I think of a what it means to be a man’s man, I think of real cowboys in the Flint Hills of Kansas. They don’t make them any tougher.  Strong, dependable, independent, honest, and ornery.  That’s a good cowboy.  

 

Tucked back up in the hills of northern Nicaragua so close Honduras you can spit watermelons seeds across the border, sits a village of 250 people.   They have no electricity, no running water (other than the river which floods them and their crops at least once a year), and no vehicles except ox-drawn carts.  In good times, a family makes a dollar a day.  

 

With each trip I made to Nicaragua came an increasing desire to do something different besides relief work.  Food and medicine were important, but I wondered what we could do to help foster long-term sustainability.  So we came up with the idea to “Adopt-a-Village” and began working with them to help them establish long-term sustainability.  Jicaro Bonito was our village.

 

Having been trained in facilitation, I’ve learned that you accomplish much more with people if you ask for their suggestions rather than giving them your advice.  So we asked. They talked. We listened. They worked.  However, this method does not always work with your teen-agers.

 

The women wanted to sew, so we sat up a sewing co-op with a teacher. Some wanted a brick kiln, so we loaned them the money which they repaid by providing bricks so we could replace cardboard shacks in the village with holes so big you could throw a screaming cat through.  We set up a micro-loan system. We loaned a cow to each family for three years so they could start a herd. We helped the children go to school.  While some of our projects enjoyed great success and others fainted in the equatorial sun, we enjoyed enough productivity that the government of Nicaragua decided to sit up and take notice. They sent their big-wigs out to check on us.

 

Dr. Miguel Medal and his assistant came to the village and interviewed the leaders and me.  They were quite impressed and wondered if we could duplicate our model in other villages.  

 

Okay, this is where the cowboy idea comes in. See, I wasn’t just writing about cowboys because I want to be one, I really do have a point that I was making.

 

So I got on my Big White Horse.  Not literally, because the horses they have in the village are as emaciated and malnourished as the people.  They are the beautiful Paso Fino breed, but in Nicaragua they are very small and basically skin and bones. But I figuratively  got on my Big White Horse as I began to boast of our accomplishments in the village. I felt like I was the cowboy that rode in and saved the day.  A chest-out, pearl-snaps-a-popping, thumbs-hooked-in-my-belt-loop, ten-gallon-hat kind of swagger. 

 

Shortly into my pontification,  it hit me like a bull busting through an old wooden corral: How arrogant!  Just because I was born in a country of incredible resources and had people who supported our efforts with their money did not mean I had any cause to boast. It was the people of Jicaro Bonito, not me, who were sweating in the tropical heat to build brick kilns and plant crops and sew clothes. All I did was bring in some money to help fund their initiatives.

 

So I climbed down off my Big White Horse, as I was talking to Dr. Medal, and shifted the attention to the wonderful people in the village and how we had benefitted from our relationships with them. Their cultural family values; their willingness to work hard without complaint; their ease of laughter and quickness to celebrate small things;  their sense of community;  all of these things were values with which they inspired us.  In fact, my son put a saying on our fridge after one of the trips: “Someone slap me if I ever whine again.”  

 

Sometimes people who care about suffering -and try to do something about it- can get what I call, “innocent arrogance.” We don’t mean to be boastful, it’s just that, comparatively speaking, we have so much and poverty stricken people have so little that we want to share our stuff with them. So we can get the idea that since we’re better off than them, we’re maybe better than them.   But it is a two-way street and what they have to offer, although maybe not as tangible, is equally as important.  

 

As we got ready to leave the village at the end of the day, one of my favorite people came to say good-bye.  Santiago, a quiet, white-haired older man who commanded respect by his mere presence, came up to me holding a gunny-sack. I hadn’t seen a real burlap gunny-sack since I fed horses as a teen-ager.

 

The sack was squirming. Squirming sacks make me nervous. Whatever is in it is usually angrier than a jilted lover on the Jerry Springer show.  He handed it to me. I knew it was a gift and, most likely, dinner.  I didn’t know if it was s snake or some other unpleasant creature.

 

“Open it.”  He nodded towards me.

 

“Do I have to?” I thought to myself.

 

I cautiously opened it waiting for it to spring like an old jack-in-the-box.  Those contraptions still scare the living daylights out of me.  Staring up from the bottom of the sack was a beautiful white bunny rabbit.  When it comes to natural beauty, bunny rabbits rank right up there on the adorability-meter with horses.

 

He had given me a gift of enormous proportion. I gave to him out of my excess:  He gave to me out of his need.  This rabbit could feed his starving family.

 

I humbly took the rabbit and thanked him. No, we didn’t eat the rabbit – we gave her to a family that raised rabbits in a village about thirty miles away with a promise that they would deliver a litter to Santiago soon.

 

Santiago passed away this year, a death I mourn greatly.  I will always remember him because of what he taught me:

 

Little White Rabbits are better than Big White Horses any day.