Creating a home abroad: Jane “Juanita” Boyd

Posted on personal blog December 26, 2011

Through the cigarette smoke and glow of Christmas lights in Café Luz, a white woman chats amiably from behind the bar with her Nicaraguan friends, neighbors and employees. A 45-year-old English expatriate, Jane “Juanita” Boyd, has settled in Estelí, Nicaragua, establishing her roots in the rocky, volcanic soil of a beaten country.

Photo by Michael Beall

“It’s not been easy,” she said. “I used to think being a foreigner was the hardest part. But it’s more being a woman.”

Boyd has established her home, family and business in this dusty, mountainous town known for its tobacco and coffee production. In 2001, she arrived in Estelí as a wandering backpacker. She returned to voluntarily teach English in the nearby Miraflor area, a nature reserve that contains nine agrarian communities. There she began to gain an inkling of how this community functioned, and suffered.

She was traveling back and forth to England to maintain her job in the wine industry, but it wasn’t enough. The misty mountains of Nicaragua ensnared her. Besides, she had met the future father of her two daughters

In 2005 she made the permanent move to Estelí. Looking for a more sustainable way to live, she opened Café Luz. This restaurant by day, bar by night, caters to the tastes of both foreigners and locals with typical bean, rice and plantain dishes as well as those of hummus and granola. Boyd later opened Hostel Luna, just across the street from Café Luz, and dramatically expanded her flow of foreign travelers.

In the hostel, travelers looking to experience family life in Nicaraguan can arrange a home stay. For $20 plus an 80-cent bus ride, adventurers can live with these people for a day, eat three simple but excellent meals at their table, sleep in their home, play with their children, work in their gardens and, perhaps, understand a bit more about these people.

Though Boyd’s ecotourism program, known as Treehugger Inc., goes further. One project she’s expanding is women-run, individual family gardens.

“Anything larger than a bush is controlled by men,” she said. “These are the things that generate money like coffee plants, livestock and vehicles. But gardens are unobtrusive.”

To enter this power struggle, Boyd helps moms develop organic garden plots to bring nutritional food staples into their homes and with the surplus to sell for profit. Having chemical-free produce is also attractive to restaurants that have discovered the profitability of catering organics to foreigners. All of Café Luz’ produce comes from Miraflor.

To kick-start a garden those who prove their interest and dedication by attending a number of training sessions are given 50 percent of the money for materials they determine they need. The other 50 percent is then paid back to Treehugger. Most pay this back in a number of predetermined installments by selling their surplus.

Not all projects succeed. One failure was establishing communal gardens. Conflict came when people bicker on who did more work, and who deserves more produce.

“This model has worked in London and New York, but not here,” Boyd said. “It takes learning from all these failures to create a perfect project – one that takes in all the geographical, social and climatic limitations in an area.”

In Boyd’s ten years in Nicaragua, she’s had to deal with jealously among program participants and petty squabbles between tourism organizations.

“It’s been a learning curve,” she said. “Some groups have played nasty.”

This has even extended to her personal life. As a foreign business leader she’s intimidating, many harbor especially sharp memories of past foreign interventions. But some of the more distasteful attacks have come with the end of her marriage.

“My relationships are very scrutinized,” Boyd said. “Women here are strong in their own way, but they tolerate unfaithfulness in a way that I can’t. Some still can’t understand why I left my husband.”

There have been some low hits, but Boyd has built a Nicaraguan family for herself and her daughters, ages five and one. Employees in her hostel and café treat her as a respected older sister, and in turn protect her from skeptics in the community. Families in Miraflor that host her travelers praise her intelligence and innovation. Her daughters have dozens of aunts, uncles and cousins across the region, further strengthening her embrace of Nicaragua.