This community has saved 46 nests so. You are saving turtles, but it’s farther reaching than that. You are participating in transformational development in our community. Your involvement is allowing us to love our neighbors in a very tangible way.
Five years ago I knew nothing about sea turtles except that I loved the vibe of that turtle on Finding Nemo. When we moved to Nicaragua, it wasn’t to save the sea turtles. The first time we encountered a mother turtle laying her eggs near our home, we all in awe. As a family, we watched her make a nest and lay her eggs. We followed her as she returned to the water and watched her swim away. As we made our way back toward the nest, someone was already digging up the eggs. I was outraged! At the time I spoke little Spanish, but managed to understand the the person digging up the eggs was not going to sell them to the market, but was going to take them to sell to a Turtle Vivero where eggs would be “protected”. I didn’t believe him, and I still had lots of questions. Why would someone dig up turtle eggs? Aren’t they endangered? Isn’t there some kind of rule against this?
After cooling off and doing some research I gained some perspective. There aren’t many options to earn money in our community. When you are struggling to find enough money to buy the rice for today, rules about protecting endangered species don’t really compute. As a father, I would do almost anything to put food on the table so I began to understand the why. In this corner of the world gathering these eggs is a much need income source and a social norm for generations. We believe it is our responsibility to take action against injustice when we are made aware of it. In this case an endangered species was being disturbed, but the reason was because people don’t have enough to eat. So the question became, how do we create sources of income so people can have space to care about the people, the beauty, and the God around them?
A starting place was opening our own turtle vivero (turtle nursery). With the vivero, we are able to provide a full time job for Yader (our vivero manager), provide an income source for our neighbors who find and sell eggs, and also increase the survival rate of the eggs laid on our beach by placing them in protected nests. In La Tribu Radiante, we are educating our students about the life cycle of the turtles and helping them experience the beauty that is happening around them. Last year, working with the turtles did provide these social benefits, but I was surprised when I encountered a spiritual element as well.
“We cannot attain the presence of God because we are already totally IN the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness. Little do we realize that God is maintaining us in existence with every breath we take. As we take another is means God is choosing us now, and now, and now.
-Richard Rohr”
