Early Life and Education
Astorga was born to a religious, upper-middle-class family in Managua. She was the first child of a lumber exporter and rancher with connections to the powerful ruling Somoza family. In her youth she was a devout Roman Catholic, often doing charitable work in the poor neighborhoods of Managua.
In 1967, she announced to her family's dismay that she supported Fernando Agüero, not his opponent Anastasio Somoza Debayle, in the presidential election. For her personal safety and to "straighten her out," her family sent her to study medicine in the United States, where she remained from 1967 to 1969. However, the animal dissections disturbed her and she had to abandon her studies. She said of the years she spent in Washington, D.C., "What impressed me most about the United States were the social contrasts and above all the racism. I had never seen racism like that in Nicaragua ... y political consciousness was born then."
Astorga married Jorge Jenkins when she was 22. Astorga had four children, two with her husband, two with Jose Maria Alvarado, a member of the Sandinistas.
Read more about this topic: Nora Astorga
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“She gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)