Nicaragua

DOES ANYONE remember Nicaragua? Where U.S.-backe rebels that former President Reagan likened to our Founding Fathers were fighting communism? "Our side" won, but the average Nicaraguan is no better off, and U.S. indifference is partly to blame.That is what prompted President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro to come to the U.S. [last] week on her first visit since being elected in 1990 -- to remind President Bush and Congress that her country is still desperate for U.S. aid. But does anyone remember Mrs. Chamorro?

While still attending undergraduate school, Dr. Patrick J. Byrne made a promise: If he had the good fortune to go into medicine and become a doctor, he would do something for the underserved. That promise has transitioned from volunteering on medical mission trips each year to establishing his own nonprofit, the Face Forward Foundation. Focused on providing free treatment to correct cleft lip, cleft palate and other facial deformities for children in Nicaragua and other developing countries, the Baltimore-based nonprofit also follows up the surgeries with rehabilitation services provided through a telemedicine initiative.

The U.S. visit by Violeta Chamorro was the first by a Nicaraguan president to Washington since 1939. That is symbol enough of the self-respect and respectability to which this elected leader has brought her war-torn little country. She and Nicaragua deserve American help. The most important thing President Bush could do, as well as the least, was receive her. That he and Congress did.But beyond fending off right-wing contra carping at her policy of national reconciliation, which the Bush administration also did, it might also have coughed up a lot of money.

It happened six years ago, but the game and its dramatic final goal - scored by Zoey Bouchelle with four seconds left in double overtime - remains fresh in the minds of almost everybody associated with girls soccer at Notre Dame Prep. When Bouchelle skillfully placed a shot underneath the John Carroll goalkeeper - the final touch of an illustrious high school career and her third goal of the game - the Blazers earned a thrilling 5-4 victory that brought the program's only Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland A Conference championship.

Nicaragua has little to show for a year of democratically elected government dedicated to reconciliation. Few Nicaraguans are reconciled.Inflation is running at 12,000 percent and unemployment at 40 percent. The government of Violetta Chamorro is split between moderates, who approve her concessions to the ousted Sandinistas, and hard-line ex-contras who want faster land redistribution to former contra soldiers.The Sandinista-controlled unions are on a new round of strikes, anticipating austerities that the International Monetary Fund wants Mrs. Chamorro to impose.

FROM JULY 1990 until last month, I lived in the Nicaraguan town of San Juan de Limay, which has been linked to Baltimore since 1985 by a people-to-people project called Casa Baltimore/Limay.During my stay -- actually my fourth and by far my longest visit to the village -- I studied Spanish and talked constantly with Nicaraguans from every walk of life.What I found in Limay, and in my frequent trips to the capital city of Managua, was a political, economic and social reality that defies the stereotypes we North Americans have imposed on Nicaragua.

GALLANTRY abounded last week when Violeta Chamorro made the rounds in Washington, a year after she became president of Nicaragua.President Bush extolled her "exhilarating victory" over the Sandinistas. After she addressed Congress, a California Republican called her "a miracle in the Western Hemisphere."It's embarrassing that Washington has disbursed only $207 million of $541 million pledged to a democratic regime that honors human rights and seeks economic reform.Some American conservatives ungallantly fault Chamorro's decision to retain Humberto Ortega, brother of the former president, as armed forces chief.

With a warm smile, a youth minister from Nicaragua introduced himself with a song to the fourth grade at Taneytown Elementary."How many know 'La Bamba?' " asked Eddy Moncada, a minister at Mision Cristiana in Managua, the nation's capital. Hands shot up instantly at the mention of the familiar Spanish tune, and the children joined loudly in the chorus of his lively rendition.The children then played a question-and-answer game with Mr. Moncada and his pastor, Rogelio Morales.The two Central American visitors spent last week in Carroll County as guests of the Westminster Church of the Brethren -- the church that established a sister relationship with the mission about two years ago. Last year, a group from Westminster JTC visited the church in Nicaragua.

Washington. -- In Nicaragua, the crisis of democracy deepens with each fresh revelation of bribery, corruption, intimidation, money laundering and murder in high places.By now all the institutions of government have been affected -- the presidency, Congress, the banks, police, army and courts. It is clear that, behind the facade of democracy, the Sandinistas have regained control of Nicaragua's government, and are using that control to enrich themselves, to bribe the members of the opposition who can be bought, to strong-arm those who cannot and to stifle criticism.

A strong earthquake set off tidal waves that flooded dozens of communities on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. The extent of casualities was unknown early today, but the Red Cross says there were at least 14 deaths.Details on Page 2A

Jean Buttitta wanted to find a way to have students in her Spanish classes at Fallston High School connect with children in a Spanish-speaking country. The answer came to her when she heard on the radio that Cal Ripken Jr. and Dennis Martinez were visiting Nicaragua to teach baseball to about 500 children and 100 coaches. She contacted the State Department to get details, and then she and more than 300 Fallston High students started a collection of school supplies that will be delivered by Ripken and Martinez during their trip.

After a 21-year major league baseball career that took him from Baltimore to Cooperstown, Cal Ripken Jr. says he's still amazed at where the sport continues to lead him. Ripken will make his second trip for the U.S. State Department as an American Public Diplomacy Envoy next month when he and former Orioles teammate Dennis Martinez tour Nicaragua on a goodwill mission that will use baseball as an international handshake. "Never in a million years would I have expected to be doing something like this," Ripken said yesterday.

Compas de Nicaragua, a nonprofit organization supporting health and education projects in Nicaragua, will present a Nicaragua folklore dance performance at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 15 at the Meeting House, 5885 Robert Oliver Place, in Oakland Mills Village Center. The multimedia performance includes dances in costume, performed to marimba music. Members of the five-member ensemble are also members of Mujeres en Accion (Women in action), a women's group that lives and works on community projects in a poor settlement in Managua, Nicaragua.

MEXICO CITY -- Hurricane Felix killed at least nine people and damaged thousands of homes as it passed through Nicaragua. But the storm failed to produce the major flooding that many feared in neighboring Honduras, officials said yesterday. Little more than a day after it came ashore as a Category 5 hurricane, Felix was downgraded to a tropical depression. In the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, where 300,000 people were evacuated from low-lying neighborhoods, the rain stopped and life returned to normal.

San Pedro Sula, Honduras -- Hurricane Felix came ashore on Nicaragua's remote Miskito Coast early yesterday as a Category 5 storm, damaging about 5,000 homes in the region before moving west toward the heart of this country of 7 million people, officials said. Less than 12 hours later and more than 1,600 miles away in the Pacific, a second and much weaker hurricane, Henriette, struck the resort city of San Jose del Cabo on the southern tip of Baja California. The center of Henriette's eye reached the Baja mainland yesterday afternoon about six miles east of San Jose del Cabo's downtown.

GRANADA, NICARAGUA / / Boomtown fever is often followed by nostalgia for the way of life that just disappeared. Rapid change usually means rapid loss of charm. Tourism boomtowns are, of course, no exception, and the world brims with overbuilt locations where it's now impossible to find what led folks to flock there in the first place. (Cabo San Lucas, can you hear me?) Nicaragua's colonial gem of Granada, and its lakeside cobblestone streets, has thankfully not yet lost its character, but it doesn't take long here to see that nearly every block features a new hotel or a building for sale.

MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- The prostitutes stalking the streets that ring the volcanic hills and craters of this gritty capital are young -- very young. Some have barely reached their teens. Some say they are selling sex to feed their starving siblings. Some say they were sent to this job by their unemployed, single mothers."I try to help them," says the Rev. Xabier Gorostiaga, rector of the Jesuit University of Central America. "I tell them I can give them a scholarship to the university. But they say, 'I already have a scholarship to the university.

Compas de Nicaragua, a nonprofit organization supporting health and education projects in Nicaragua, will present a Nicaragua folklore dance performance at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 15 at the Meeting House, 5885 Robert Oliver Place, in Oakland Mills Village Center. The multimedia performance includes dances in costume, performed to marimba music. Members of the five-member ensemble are also members of Mujeres en Accion (Women in action), a women's group that lives and works on community projects in a poor settlement in Managua, Nicaragua.

For $10,000 a day, you can have the ultimate surfing sojourn in Indonesia aboard the 110-foot Indies Trader IV, a sort of floating hotel with 15 cabins, a helipad and three-course meals with wine. A motorized tender takes you to the waves. Or for a daily rate, in addition to the cost of his airfare, Brad Gerlach can be your private instructor anywhere in the world. Gerlach, who was ranked No. 1 on the surfing's world professional tour during the 1986 and 1991 seasons, termed the cost "not cheap at all."

MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- Daniel Ortega, the rebel leader driven from power 16 years ago by a U.S.-backed war and the missteps of his own Sandinista movement, was cruising toward victory and an unlikely political resurrection in Nicaragua's presidential vote yesterday. The result was a blow to the Bush administration, which worked actively to discourage Nicaraguans from voting for Ortega, a 60-year-old former Marxist now allied with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the bete noire of Latin American and U.S. conservatives.