CONSTRUCTIVE DISSENT : A Topanga-Based Group Is Opposing U.S. Policy by Helping Nicaraguans With Building Projects

Ted Heselton is, in effect, a contra Contra. The 40-year-old West Kennebunkport, Me., carpenter and Vietnam veteran spent 6 weeks in war-torn Nicaragua in 1987 helping build houses, a school and a water system in a poor rural cooperative.

“I was frustrated with demonstrations and wanted to do something more personal and practical,” said Heselton, a staunch opponent of U.S. support for the anti-Sandinista rebels. “The point is to somehow help the situation rather than having those policies done in my name as a U.S. taxpayer.”

Heselton is one of 350 volunteers from across the nation who have been recruited and dispatched to Nicaragua’s battle-scarred highlands since 1984 by a Topanga-based organization, Architects and Planners in Support of Nicaragua. These short-term brigadistas have built 85 homes, four schools and four water systems.

Providing Equipment

APSNICA, as it is known, has also shipped $170,000 in trucks, generators, chain-saw mills and other equipment to Nicaragua and taught campesinos to use them. It has sent teachers, biochemists and transportation planners to the Central American country for several months each to assist the government. It has arranged trips for Americans to see the revolution firsthand. And, most recently, it is helping rebuild a hurricane-ravaged village.

Its slogan defines its mission: “Help Build Not Destroy in Nicaragua.”

The grass-roots, nonprofit project is run out of an architectural firm, set deep within wooded Topanga Canyon, that specializes in helping the poor and handicapped. APSNICA is one of a handful of groups nationwide--and the largest in Southern California--that recruits Americans to support a Sandinista revolution that the Reagan Administration has actively opposed for the past 8 years.

Challenging Policy

“Our idea always was that we should bring people down in different capacities so that they can see what was happening there, work with the Nicaraguans, help them, but also come back here and tell others what they’ve seen so we can change the policy of the Administration,” said Stephen Kerpen, 52, the Topanga architect who founded and directs APSNICA.

“It’s a policy, sad to say, that doesn’t respect the sovereignty of Nicaragua, that’s contemptuous of Third World people. And it’s a policy that kills men, women and children.”

APSNICA’s educational program--which includes individual slide shows, house parties and a quarterly newsletter--has reached more than 15,000 individuals in the United States, Kerpen said. Volunteers have also made presentations to civic groups, including several local Rotary clubs.

Nationwide, groups such as the Quixote Center in Mount Rainier, Md.; Witness for Peace in Washington, and TecNica in Berkeley have raised $202 million in labor and supplies for Nicaragua since June, 1985, according to Sister Maureen Fiedler, co-director of the Quixote Center. In addition, she said 1,500 Americans are working in Nicaragua at any given time.

These efforts seek to counteract U.S. military and humanitarian support for the Contras. In fact, Fiedler said, annual fund-raising goals have been based on the amount of U.S. Contra aid.

APSNICA’s recruits represent a cross-section of men and women from 15 states. Their ranks have included a cabinetmaker, computer programmer, factory worker, lawyer, park ranger, electrician, waitress, mechanical engineer, university lecturer and music teacher.

Some enlist because they want to see firsthand what’s happening in Nicaragua, Kerpen said. Others are drawn to a revolution that they say epitomizes a sense of community and idealism that is missing in the United States. Many are driven by opposition to the Administration’s Central American policy.

Selective Service Age

Heselton, who lives 12 miles from President-elect George Bush’s family estate, has another, more personal, incentive to see the Central American hostilities end: His 19-year-old son recently registered with the Selective Service.

“I don’t want to see him killing Nicaraguans, and I don’t want to see him in a war down there,” he said. “I don’t see anything going on in Central America that’s worth Americans dying for.”

Everyone pays his or her way down, room and board, a $300 administrative fee and insurance costs as well as foregoing potential earnings at home. APSNICA bluntly advises prospective recruits that they are putting themselves “in an inherently risky situation.”

Participants find various ways to take the time off. Some are self-employed. Those who work in construction may go during the winter lull. Some teachers use their summer vacations. Others take a leave of absence or go between jobs.

The U.S. State Department does not have an official policy opposing such groups as APSNICA as long as they comply with U.S. law, said press officer Anita Stockman. Kerpen, however, maintains that APSNICA has been harassed by the government while shipping supplies. And some U.S. elected officials are critical of those who seek to bolster the Managua government.

Sandinistas Criticized

“It’s hard to object to people building shelter for the citizens of Nicaragua, who are certainly among the oppressed of the earth,” said Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), a high-profile Contra supporter. “I do object to strengthening the Sandinista government because I think it’s a tyranny.”

Meanwhile, the Sandinistas--who work closely with APSNICA--welcome the volunteers with open arms.

“They’ve been doing a wonderful job there,” said Rita Clark, who is assistant to Nicaragua’s charge d’affaires in Washington and has visited APSNICA projects. “These are people who saw a need and they started helping. The more they do, the more they want to do.”

Larry Weiss, 41, a Minneapolis carpenter and self-described anti-imperialist, first went to Nicaragua with APSNICA in early 1987. He returned for almost 8 months later in the year as a project coordinator with his wife and two daughters. He’s going back for 6 weeks in March.

‘Won’t Give Up’

Weiss said he was most impressed by the pride and determination of the Nicaraguan peasants. For example, he recalled sitting around a campfire one evening when two older couples discussed the hardships they endured under Gen. Anastasio Somoza, the former U.S.-backed Nicaraguan president who was ousted by the revolution in 1979.

“One guy said, ‘We’ll die before we’ll go back to that. We’re campesinos . We know hunger. We can do that again. But we won’t give up what we have for anything.’ ”

Two events in the past 2 years have spurred APSNICA to expand its activities. The most recent was Hurricane Joan, which killed more than 116 Nicaraguans in October and further wracked an economy already crippled by war.

In response, APSNICA established a wood-milling operation in Pearl Lagoon on the Caribbean coast 25 miles north of Bluefields, a town of 42,000 that was largely destroyed. Volunteers are harvesting hurricane-felled trees on the river bank and floating them downriver to the mill, where they will be used to rebuild homes.

Activist’s Death

The other occurrence was the death of Benjamin E. Linder, 27, a mechanical engineer from Portland, Ore., who suffered a fatal head wound in 1987 when his armed work crew was ambushed by rebels in the northern Nicaragua war zone. Linder was working on a hydroelectric project under the auspices of the Nicaragua Appropriate Technology Project, which he had helped found.

“We felt strongly that he was targeted because he was a real figure down there,” Kerpen said as he sat at his desk beneath a poster of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. “And we felt it was a means for this Administration to stop other Americans from building in Nicaragua. So instead of stopping us, we made plans to build twice as much.”

Unlike Linder, who was reportedly carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle for protection, APSNICA volunteers do not bear arms. Instead, they put themselves in the hands of the cooperative defense committees. There have been no APSNICA casualties.

The construction efforts are around the town of Mantiguas in the Matagalpa region of north-central Nicaragua, which Kerpen describes as “a war zone but not what you might call a combat zone.” Volunteers have heard mortar fire but never been in imminent danger, he said.

Grieving Mother

They have encountered grieving Nicaraguans, however. When an APSNICA-sponsored delegation visited a cooperative that had been attacked by Contras, a woman took the group to the grave site of her 16-year-old son who had been killed 5 days earlier, Kerpen recalled.

“She said, ‘If any of you have cameras, take pictures of all the kids because I don’t even have a photograph of my son.’ ”

Still, the volunteers face many hardships. Health problems are endemic. APSNICA warns participants prior to departure that typhoid fever is “not uncommon”; hepatitis is “very common”; malaria is “quite common”; worms, amoebas and other diarrhea-causing parasites are “almost inevitable,” and “many Nicaraguan dogs have rabies.”

Living conditions are primitive. The weather is hot and humid. Food is simple. The workweek entails 45 hours of hard physical labor. Volunteers wash their clothes by hand in the river.

Self-Sufficient

“I realized how simple the life is there, how people have learned to live on the basis of their ability to devise tools and hard work,” said Lisa Aarli, 29, a Chicago tenant organizer who spent 2 months in Nicaragua in early 1988. “It was one of the most intensive experiences of my life.”

The experience of working in Nicaragua generally reinforces pre-existing support for the revolution or creates new-found sympathy, Kerpen said. Volunteers Heselton, Weiss and Aarli said this was the case for them.

Still, Aarli said: “We were very isolated. We were staying on this cooperative. We didn’t get out to see other things. In some ways, I didn’t see much in a bigger, broader sense.”

It was the bigger geopolitical picture that Kerpen says drew him to Nicaragua as a cause. A native New Yorker, he began his architectural activism nearly 25 years ago with urban renewal efforts in Harlem and continued them when he moved to California in the late ‘60s and directed the Rural Development Corp., which built federally subsidized housing in rural areas.

Unpaid Post

In 1971, he established a private architectural firm specializing in low-income housing and barrier-free designs for the disabled with his partner, David Marshall. Peoples Center for Housing Change now provides the headquarters and corporate umbrella for APSNICA; Kerpen is the unsalaried, full-time director, while Marshall handles Peoples Center’s paying clients.

Kerpen and two others founded APSNICA after a trip to Nicaragua in 1984. The idea arose when a Sandinista official asked them to raise money in the United States for housing in Nicaragua. The first brigade was dispatched in December, 1985, to build 25 simple 3-room, brick-and-stone houses, a 1,200-square-foot school and a water system.

“Some people will ask us, ‘Well, aren’t there communists down there?’ ” Kerpen said. “The fact is that every country has a right to decide what kind of a government they have. . . . Of course, if anything, it’s a nationalist government down there and nothing else. But the question itself is impertinent.”