Almost immediately after he arrived in Managua in late 1989, the Reverend Grant Gallup, a tall man of 59 with a strong, chiseled face and gray curly hair, joined the regular Thursday picket line outside the U.S. embassy protesting American policy in Nicaragua. Gallup had been sent to Managua by his Episcopal bishop in Chicago, Frank Griswold. The Chicago diocese and the Nicaraguan diocese had just established a companion relationship, and Gallup was to act as a liaison. He was to teach at the seminary, assist the Nicaraguan bishop in pastoral work, and set up a series of visits of Chicagoans to Nicaragua, like those he had been making since 1985.
Gallup responded to Bishop Downs’s antagonism by establishing Casa Ave Maria, which was officially recognized by the government as an alternative ministry. Today Casa Ave Maria is in a different house in a “humbler neighborhood” (the owners of the first house returned to Managua after the February 1990 elections). It is a favorite source of food, money, and medicine and an oasis of priestly kindness for Gallup’s poor neighbors, many of whom live on $50 a month. Gallup also provides hospitality to visitors from outside the country and other parts of Nicaragua, as well as guidance and financial help to 25 artisan families in Masaya, a country town that is a traditional artisan center. And he helps a women’s health center in the town of Mulukulu and conducts prayer services three times a day.
After his Army stint he went into the Episcopal Seabury-Western Seminary in Evanston, having decided that “it would be safer than the Presbyterian ministry, because there are a lot of single clergy in the Episcopal church.” And, he says, “I was impressed with the beauty of the Episcopal worship and the less puritanical attitudes than in the other American religions that are so infected by Calvinism.” He estimates that when he was in the seminary about 30 percent of the students were gay.
Another thing we’re going to do is establish pharmacies in poor neighborhoods–the barrios–because the Chamorro government has effectively ended the distribution of free medicine that the Sandinistas had in place. Now people have to get prescriptions and pay for their medicines. Even people in hospitals must get their own medicines. I know a North American woman who was in hospital, and the doctor prescribed antibiotics, and she had to have friends shop for her drugs for her. The hospitals have no medicines to dispense. So we’re going to establish these pharmacies and dispense medicines according to people’s ability to pay. Some, of course, have no money to pay for more than the merest subsistence, so we will give them their medicines free. Others will buy at cost or perhaps for some a little more. I got interested in this project through a woman friend, Dorothy Granada, who runs a women’s health center in Mulukulu, a little town north of Managua that grew up as a result of the war. They have no running water and no electricity, and are miles and miles away from any health care. Dorothy and her husband built a thatch-and-bamboo hut where her husband teaches a carpentry class for women and Dorothy runs a health center. It was her need for basic medicines–Band-Aids and aspirin–that provoked us into this project.
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But in Nicaragua there is another reality. The entire center supports Chamorro. Only the extreme right, the Godoyistas, as they’re called, and the extreme left oppose her. When Violeta left the country to speak in Washington last spring, Godoy declared himself acting president. But when he went to the president’s office to take over, the troops kept him out. The legislature has since clarified that he will only become president after her disability of 30 days or more.
Chamorro is herself a centrist, nowhere near the right-winger that Godoy is. She has, for instance, reined in the mayor of Managua, Arnoldo Aleman, who is the former head of the youth group for Anastasio Somoza and is a very vengeful man who, among other things, wanted to tear down the wall that had been erected around Daniel Ortega’s house. And he ordered the removal of all the murals painted by Sandinista and other artists all over the city. His crews began whitewashing them, but Violeta stopped him after the artists, both left and right, protested. She stopped him from tearing down Ortega’s wall, saying, “The former president is entitled to his privacy.” Aleman also wanted to tear down the squatter settlements erected around the American embassy and around the markets. Violeta also stopped that.
