In northern Costa Rica, a Nicaraguan refugee forced by circumstances to give up his life as a student and graphic designer now spends his days caressing and talking to pigs to keep them calm.
Most of the about 300 Nicaraguan refugees striving for self-sufficiency on rented Costa Rican farmland were farmers in their native country, too. They waxed poetic about the joy they feel watching livestock graze or green shoots spring from seed they sowed.
Not so for Erling Mora Lopez, the 30-year-old graphic designer-turned-refugee pig farmer from Managua.
Photo: AP
Mora studied at the Polytechnic University of Nicaragua and worked part-time at a local publishing house when he and his classmates took to the streets to defend senior citizens protesting changes to the country’s social security benefits in April 2018.
Mora and others took control of their university campuses and held them for months. He also moved on to occupy the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua and was there when government allies violently cleared it in July 2018, killing two students.
For months he laid low, but lived in fear of arrest as government allies in his neighborhood monitored his movements.
Last year, he was arrested, tortured for eight days in Managua’s infamous El Chipote prison and then released. Within five hours he was hitchhiking to Costa Rica.
For two months he kicked around the capital, San Jose, sometimes sleeping in the street. He got mugged and people who initially said that they wanted to help took advantage of him.
Then he heard about Francisca Ramirez’s rural encampment up north in Upala. Her network vetted him and assigned him to the pigpen, which he saw as the ultimate filter.
“It’s a very, very, very big change,” Mora said, taking a break from his duties. “I miss my job, I miss my studies, but this is what I have to do.”
The learning curve has been steep. When other refugees — experienced farmers — help him clean out the pigpen, they somehow walk out clean.
“Not me. I come out a disaster,” he said.
One night he found one of the sows in labor. She had already delivered three piglets on her own, but a fourth was still inside and her breathing was labored.
He called the Costa Rican who had given them the pigpen. The man told him he would have to reach inside and pull out the piglet.
Mora’s eyes grew big at this point, as he mimed slathering his arm in cooking oil and fishing out the last piglet.
He said that before “I grabbed the keyboard, the mouse … and now a pig.”
The job has grown on him.
Mora even had his own Charlotte’s Web moment when a runt piglet took a liking to him.
It was too small to hold its own with the others in the pigpen, so he let it run free. It would follow him around like a dog and come to where he slept to let him know something was going on in the pigpen or to beg for food.
Over time it grew big enough that someone wanted to buy it, but they requested that it be delivered dead. There was not the same happy ending as the children’s classic about an undersized pig facing slaughter.
Mora did not have to kill the pig, but said: “I really cried.”
He added that he does not let himself get so attached anymore.
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