On Friday we visited a place in Granada called Café de las Sonrisas; or the cafe of smiles. While there we met an extremely innovative and compassionate man from Spain who started the project Café Sonrisa. He moved to Nicaragua from Spain eleven years ago and I had a feeling that he was from Spain because he was the first person in Nicaragua that I heard use the vosotros form in his Spanish. Café Sonrisa has helped blind and deaf individuals through job creation. The types of jobs that become available to them are restaurant related and methods of hammock making.
I was amazed by the man who created this project because when first entering the café I imaged that he was just going to teach us about how his project has helped people and how they make the hammocks. However, he began by saying that he was cook when he was in Spain. He then talked to us about economies and how we as consumers have a huge responsibility to helping countries around the world maintain their economies. This included how buying shirts and other goods made in other countries promoted slave labor and sweat shops. He talked about other economic dynamics between the United States and Nicaragua and how most of the Nicaraguans who become doctors, lawyers and professors move to the United States to obtain these jobs. The problem then is that these fields are not capable of progress within Nicaragua. He also tied this into immigration and how people have to understand that people in countries like Nicaragua have no choice but to try and immigrate so that they can find jobs and make money for their families. It already amazed me how much he knew about what was happening in the world and it was very humbling of him to keep going back to the fact that he was just a cook.
Just when I thought he couldn’t become anymore multi-faceted, he began talking about the things he created. He showed us tools he created to help with things related to the project and how they were essentially just made out of commonly used items, such as how they made hammocks out of plastic bags and used these plastic bags as a form of currency for people. I now began to view him in an engineering light, and I realized just how innovative he was. He talked about many of the problems he encountered in Nicaragua on his road to helping people, and how he would enter a problem-solving state of mind for days an end to figure out a solution. What truly humbled me about all of this is that I was amazed at how smart and how motivated this man was, but a part of me wondered why he was not doing something more esteemed such as engineering. What I realized was that he could be whoever he wanted to be or do whatever he wanted to do, but he chose to come to Nicaragua instead of living grandly and focus on helping people. I find that people too often are interested in their own wants and let other people’s rights suffer so that they can have more. However, what I realized while listening to this man talk, is that he was very similar to many of the people that I have met and listened to while in Nicaragua. These people have been strong, motivated and innovative but have seen the struggles of this country and realize that there are more important things than building up yourself and your material desires. They are also not doing it for any form of fame or image, they are simply doing it to make a difference. The thing that really got to me while he was talking was when he told us “Never let anyone tell you that you can’t do something and don’t let yourself believe that you can’t do something because we started from nothing and we have made all of this possible.” I’m paraphrasing a bit but he was stating this from the fact that they had little to no resources and were able to create so many things. I now feel that he believes this as well because he has seen amazing things happen in Nicaragua as far as efforts for helping the people in the country. This is not something that I will forget especially after he showed us what he was capable of doing. With enough will, and enough motivation for the right cause, anything is possible.