In a place where only the devil himself would be comfortable, Brad Corrigan '96 believes—truly believes—that light can exist where only darkness has reigned.
By Bob Gulla
Photography by A.J. Neste
I am following Brad Corrigan ’96.
We are in Managua, Nicaragua, on a humanitarian mission, and he is my leader.
We are not alone. There are 200 others assembled here under Brad’s guidance, including a large group of college students on a service break and a handful of his friends and family. Coming from all corners of the U.S., we’ve gathered on this hot, humid day to assist Brad in what will soon seem an impossible task: spreading hope and good will in a shantytown called La Chureca, a ghastly poor village that rims a garbage dump on the outskirts of Managua.
Brad has officially named our journey into La Chureca Dia de Luz or “Day of Light.” His plan is to march en masse into the dump and spend the day visiting with the village’s residents—in his words “bringing light into this place filled with darkness, poverty, addiction, and disease.”
Brad has been to Managua many times for the same humanitarian purpose but without this kind of broad assistance. He and a few associates have arranged everything on the trip, from accommodations and transportation to meals and side trips; Dia de Luz is the culmination of months of planning.
From our rustic hotel in a ramshackle Managua neighborhood, we caravan to La Chureca, which is on the eastern shore of Lake Managua, an otherwise attractive location with rolling hills and expansive views that would in most countries feature upscale waterfront properties. Not here.
We park on the outskirts of the landfill and pile out of our cars; Brad climbs atop a van to speak. “We are here to bring love into a place where hate and violence rule,” he says, projecting out over the crowd, many of whom—because our day holds much uncertainty—are shuffling nervously. “We will bring light into a place where darkness has a grip, and we will bring melody into silence.” He tells us that we are not nosy photographers and detached journalists. “We go forth as friends with large hearts and open arms” to embrace the people consigned to live in this awful place.
As we look up to him, he comes across as a combination of good friend, tour guide, and determined missionary. He leads with casual authority, empowered by an intense Christian faith. In a sense, today, we are his disciples.
The group begins to walk together, quietly. From the edge of La Chureca, the broad lakeside vistas are marred by acres of ash mountains 50 or 60 feet high. Billowing clouds of toxic smoke, created by burning tires, rise into the air, graying the day’s blue sky. In the dune-like piles of garbage, mangy dogs scavenge for scraps of food. Scrawny cows nose through heaps of fish bones and rancid citrus rinds. Vultures circle overhead. That 1,000 people live here in La Chureca is unfathomable. Words did not prepare us for this scene.
“When you walk with someone,” Brad tells us, “it’s like saying, ‘We’re together.’ That’s such a precious gift, to be together with someone. And we can walk together through a hell like this and not be afraid.”
The rotten smell and wafts of thick smoke choke us. Gasping, we pull our shirts over our faces in a vain attempt to filter the noxious air. I begin to worry that I will not last the day. Nearby, along a narrow, earthen roadway a trio of garbage trucks speeds past to unload their trash; their kerchiefed drivers hoot and holler like masked bandits as they pass. Running behind the trucks in a cloud of diesel exhaust are half a dozen La Chureca boys. They work as pickers, and they’re sprinting to be among the first on the scene when the trucks unload their garbage. That way they can rummage for viable food and recyclable materials. We’re told that the speeding trucks have been known to run these boys over and kill them.
All around us, clusters of men, women, and boys sift through the refuse with long sticks and rakes, hunting for anything of value: food, plastics, scrap metal, God knows what else. As we near them, we can see faces darkened with dirt, clothes in tatters. They work 10 hours a day in La Chureca, earning roughly five dollars for their efforts.
I wonder what they think of us, a crowd of light-skinned Americans in khakis and (by now only semi-) clean T-shirts, as we troop across their pitiable landscape. As we tread through the squishy piles of fresh garbage, small, spontaneous natural gas fires erupt around us. The ground is so hot it melts the soles of our shoes.
It’s easy to mistake La Chureca for hell on Earth.
* My last encounter with Brad Corrigan was, let’s say, different than the situation we’re in right now. It was July, and Brad and I were at Madison Square Garden—I in my seat and Brad onstage alongside his former bandmates in Dispatch: fellow Middlebury students Pete Heimbold ’99 and Chad Urmston ’98.
The group, the College’s first rock stars, reunited for something called “Dispatch: Zimbabwe,” a three-night series of benefit concerts, with all proceeds going to organizations fighting disease, famine, and social injustice in the embattled African nation. In the process of staging these shows, Dispatch made history. They became the first independent rock band—that is, a band with no major corporate affiliation—to sell out Madison Square Garden . . . for three straight nights. The band, years and miles from their humble beginnings on the Middlebury campus, played to 60,000 people over the course of a single weekend. Rolling Stone quipped that it was easier to get tickets to Justin Timberlake’s one-night stand at MSG than the Dispatch benefit.
The reunion concert came three years after the band split in 2004. Brad formed a new group, dubbed it Braddigan, and began to pursue his own path. He’d been eager to explore and grow his spiritual life, and this seemed the perfect opportunity. His mode of musical expression changed, as well. Accompanied now by a Brazilian bassist (Tiago Machado) and Puerto Rican percussionist (Reinaldo DeJesus), Corrigan focused on a more intimate relationship with God and a personal identity—in songwriting and in life—that adhered closer to philanthropic and humanitarian work. He’s written pop-laced worship songs in both Spanish and English and has used them to open the doors he’d thought were long since closed. “Over the last three or four years,” he says, “I’ve gone from a conventional, build-a-career approach to music, to discovering the real power of language, how it can bring people together to heal and bless.”
Brad brought his acoustic guitar to more than a dozen countries and across several continents. In many of these destinations, he sings his songs in orphanages, AIDS hospices, and in places so remote the people he meets have never heard live Western music before. He has traveled in post-tsunami Asia, in war-ravaged Rwanda, and in oppressed Uganda, among other places. “I want to speak a deeper language with my guitar and voice,” he says. “I want to be completely in the world. We should all spend a day with the poor, the sick, the orphans, the widows, the outcasts.”
It was through his troubadour-like missionary travels that Brad first landed here in La Chureca a few years ago. He was so moved by what he saw, especially the plight of the children living here, that he and some friends took it upon themselves to try and do
. . . something.
Deanna Ford, a 2003 Princeton grad, is the director of Nica HOPE in Managua, a nonprofit focused on providing education and job training to the youth of La Chureca. “Brad was actually part of the inspiration for the start of Nica HOPE,” Ford says. “Braddigan did a fund-raising concert for Nica HOPE last summer. The people of La Chureca love him. Everyone knows ‘El Musico,’ and they wonder when his next visit and concert will be. Kids in La Chureca can be heard singing his songs ‘Cayendo’ or ‘Por El’ all the time.”
Because of their appalling surroundings, the children of La Chureca are confronted with death on a regular basis. Huffing “pego,” a highly concentrated and addictive glue, is common among kids as young as eight years old. Crack, alcohol, STDs, and child prostitution are epidemic.
One child in particular caught Brad’s attention. Ileana, a teenage girl with a brilliant, sunlit smile, had a heartbreaking story. Like many young girls coping with life in La Chureca, Ileana, one of nine siblings, was addicted to pego. To feed that addiction, she sold her body to the sanitation workers. Ileana’s parents, also drug-addicted, knew what was happening but looked on silently. They needed money to feed their own addictions. Ileana contracted HIV in the process.
Saddened, Brad acted. He whisked Ileana and a handful of other young girls in the same predicament to a safe house in the hills outside Managua. But addiction had its hooks in Ileana, and every time Brad rescued her from La Chureca, she returned to it—the only life she knew—in a wearisome game of cat and mouse. For two years now, Ileana’s struggle has been mighty. It continues to this day.
*
Having walked through the dump—and become coated with soot and smell—we are now in the village. The living conditions are deplorable. Each family lives inside four walls, often made of tin, cardboard, or plastic sheeting. Tiago, Brad’s bandmate, carries a small guitar and walks confidently through a swinging gate into the trash-strewn yard of one of the families. I follow, more tentatively. There’s a large woman sitting outside on an overturned five-gallon bucket. She smiles and places two buckets next to her. As we sit, a massive, mud-coated hog approaches us, apparently scrounging for food. The woman beans the oversized pig with a rotten orange, and it skulks away, snout down.
Tiago asks her in Spanish if she’d like to sing a song with him. She nods. He strums a few chords, and the woman sings hoarsely at first, but beautifully, in a voice that belies her soiled clothes and face. When the song is over, she cries. She pulls a necklace from inside her dress and shows us the ring on it. It’s her husband’s. He died young, she explains, because she couldn’t get him to a hospital. As she tells her story, I curse my rudimentary Spanish. I catch only the most obvious details. But her grief-stricken face fills in the rest. It’s plain to see that pain is a way of life here, pain that goes beyond these living conditions and into the hearts of its people.
The day passes. My group has fanned out to connect with the families; prayers are said in Spanish and English. Our presence has energized the kids, who run hyperactively around the village, beaming. The soccer balls we distributed have elevated the mood, as have other supplies like shoes, medicine, and backpacks. As the sun begins to set, we congregate in a dusty clearing at the foot of the village. Brad and his crew arranged for a stage to be trucked in along with electricity, amps, and instruments, as well as cases of bottled water. Slowly, people gravitate toward the stage. The Americans are popular with the young children; almost all have a young boy or girl on their shoulders or by the hand.
When the band starts, so does the dancing. And when the dancing starts the dust kicks up. By now, everyone’s covered in dirt, so the dust simply adds to the celebration, like a rain shower, only dry. Halfway through the set, water from the bottles starts to fly; the kids start soaking the “gringos,” and the cool showers feel great after a long, dusty day. “The show was really the exclamation point on Dia de Luz,” Brad will say later. “We just wanted to take all the unknowns of the day and unleash them, let all the birds out of the cage and celebrate. People were stoked just to be together. For us to see it happen from the stage, everybody covered in sweat and tears and dirt . . . the worlds were colliding, and the music provided the light. You couldn’t paint a more beautiful picture.”
The irony of this Braddigan “gig” is striking. It is not playing to 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden, raising money for Zimbabwe. This is only a tiny handful of the Earth’s downtrodden. But Brad’s exuberance makes it feel just as monumental.
“The families know that Brad’s desire is to help them see a different life,” Daniel Bain writes in an e-mail to me after I’ve returned to the States. Bain works full-time in Managua for Brad’s charity organization, Love, Light, and Melody. “The children love Brad for the encouragement and hope he brings them, and the adults respect him for the man he is, and the way he tells it like it is. . . . The impact he’s having here is hard to gauge, but you can see it in the smiles and the eyes of those he comes in contact with.”
*
Brad, Tiago, and Reinaldo begin to put their equipment away, and the crowd begins to disperse. And then Ileana appears. Quickly, she’s surrounded by her American friends, who are asking about her well-being. She looks older than she does in her photographs. The circles under her eyes are too deep for a 14-year-old.
A dozen people, including Brad and his band, encircle Ileana closely. One woman begins to pray. She pleads for Satan to leave Ileana and to make room for God. She and others shout to the heavens, begging for divine assistance, to purge this young girl once and for all of the demons that haunt her. The prayer is astonishing in its intensity, a visceral, passionate appeal for help. Together, they hold Ileana in an embrace and cry. Others in the field who are not in the prayer circle also cry. Deep down, perhaps, they know she will return to drugs and prostitution. But for the moment at least, they can hold her and protect her.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen to her,” Brad tells me. “It’s one of the hardest parts about being in La Chureca. But as long as I’m with her, I don’t have to know. Having her here with us is good enough.”
Immediately after the prayer, a friend of Brad’s points to the horizon behind the stage, where 200 feet up we can see the shadowy outline of a man walking along a ridge of ash. The sun is on the far side of him, making him stand out in silhouette. Rays emanate from behind him. The vision, even for a nonbeliever, takes our breath away. No one says a word.
It’s one final image of La Chureca, beyond the prayers, divine silhouettes, and Ileana, beyond the dancing kids and dreadful living conditions, the toxic smoke and vast piles of ash. As we pile into the vans and pull away from the dump, I turn in my seat to look back one last time at the landscape. There they are—dozens of small, sinister-looking fires, orange-yellow flames reaching to the sky. The earth is once again ablaze. After Dia de Luz, the dump’s symbolic antagonist has, very obviously, reclaimed his turf, making it easier than ever to mistake La Chureca for hell on Earth.
Bob Gulla ’ 83 is a music journalist in Wakefield, Rhode Island.
More information about La Chureca and Dia de Luz can be found
at http://lovelightandmelody.org/