Ever since I first came here almost two years ago, I’ve been interested in Costa Rica’s neighbor to the north, Nicaragua. Costa Rica is fairly well off by regional standards, while Nicaragua is the second poorest country in all the Western Hemisphere. Because of this significant economic disparity, there’s a sizeable population of undocumented Nicaraguans living in Costa Rica who are working menial jobs, living in substandard housing, and getting blamed for all of Costa Rica’s problems. Sound familiar?
I remember watching Hotel Rwanda last winter for the third or fourth time, and I was struck by the power of words when used to dehumanize people who are different. Before decent law-abiding Hutus could begin systematically hacking Tutsis to pieces in broad daylight, the Tutsis had to be made to seem sub-human. You had radio personalities calling Tutsis ‘tall trees’ and ‘cockroaches’ rather than referring to them as people. When you hear this repeated often enough, and circumstances become desperate enough, it suddenly somehow becomes no problem to ‘cut down the tall trees’ and to ‘crush the cockroaches’.
I share that because I worry about the way we in the United States sometimes talk about Mexicans and Central Americans, and the way Costa Ricans talk about Nicaraguans. People in Rwanda never thought they were capable of what they did in 1994, but before they knew it 800,000 people had been slaughtered. I’m not saying the same thing is going to happen in the southwest U.S. or here in Costa Rica, and I certainly hope humanity has learned its lesson, but there’s something tragic about dehumanization in and of itself, long before it leads to genocide.
Ironically, in the memoir written by the real-life hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, he makes the point that it was the power of words that saved the lives of those 1268 people he harbored. Words can be powerful tools for good. Words can, in a sense, serve to humanize.
On Sunday I’m taking an early bus to Managua, where I’ll be staying for a few days, visiting different development projects and ministries for a writing project. My hope for this trip, when it’s all said and done, is that the words I put down on paper, in a magazine maybe, would be words that honor the dignity of those I meet. Words that serve as little instruments of peace, reweaving in some small way a bit of the shalom that God intends for the people made in his image.
