The Day I Traveled Back to the 16th Century

Riding in the back of a pick-up truck, through an unpopulated area of Nicaragua, I began to step back in time. As we traveled away from the city of Leon, we passed by children playing simple games outside in front of their houses, men working in the yard, and women walking alongside the road balancing large baskets on their heads. We were on our way to visit with a family that extracted sugar from sugar cane.

When we finally arrived, I was instantly struck by the simplicity of their lives and their immediate kindness to the pack of strangers invading their home. The process we came to learn about was rather simple and complicated at the same time: Two oxen, tied to a wooden log, slowly walked and pivoted around a center point to power a very basic machine that crushed the sugarcane. Extracted from the cane was a juice, containing the sugar. It was then boiled for several hours and then placed into molds carved straight out of logs. After sitting in the sun, the sugar hardened into large blocks which were then, more or less, ready to be sold.

For me, the fascinating part was seeing how efficient the process worked. For example, nothing was wasted. Once the sugar cane was crushed and the juice removed, the cane was laid out to dry and then was used to fuel the fire. Furthermore, I was impressed by the use of the oxen as a means of energy. They were used to not only provide the energy for crushing the cane; they helped pull the water pail up from the well that supplied the family’s water. The well was 125 yards deep and didn’t have the luxury of a pump, so every time water was needed the bucket was dropped and pulled up 125 yards each way.

I want to share this experience with you all because I not only found it interesting, but it helped me gain a bigger perspective on the lives of others. I realized that the people we were visiting might not have had the privileges I was blessed with growing up, but in these people I saw a family that was very good at what they do and content with the life they had. They proudly smiled and laughed as we tasted every step of the process from drinking the sugar juice to the final stage when we ate the raw sugar while they explained every step of the process in detail.

As we left, I not only felt thankful for the experience, but I had a deeper appreciation for both their lives and mine. I questioned all the times in my life when I wasn’t content or proud of the work I was doing, when these folks had so much less but seemed to be so proud of what they did have.