The Savage Traveler: Nicaragua: Part 2

Wednesday, June 25: We were up in time for 7:30 breakfast at Los Ticos BUT the bus returned for us with 100 water purification barrels and tops, all the parts for them, and about 30 thin mattresses for us to use as beds for the next four nights. Repacking all that along with our luggage and leaving room for our group took a very long time. It finally appeared to be secure with two or three ropes holding a lot of it on the roof of the bus. We took the paved highway about an hour until it turned to brick, drove on brick for about 30-45 minutes till it turned to dirt and drove the dirt road for an hour or so, always climbing higher into the mountains. We drove over a very controversial dam that supplies hydroelectric power to Managua but whose reservoir destroyed hundreds of small farms. We finally arrived in the area called Zompopera, where we would live and work for four days.

We stayed in a small cement block school across the farmyard from the house of Don Pedro, who donated the land for the school. It has a large classroom with a small kitchen area with a pass-through opening. The small group that came with Kris in the winter stayed in the same place and then the latrine had hanging doors, but one door is now on the ground and the other doesn't move so Don Pedro asked us to use the house latrine down the hill from his house. Don Pedro has a big $10,000 (but donated to him) water purification system that can clean 100 gallons an hour. He has electricity to his house and pumps water from a well into the system to two tanks on his barn. The purified water comes out a spigot on the side of the barn and some goes to the kitchen of the house. The other tank is unpurified water that goes to an outdoor wash sink with two small showers next to it. The showers are unheated water that drip from simple spigots mounted high on the wall but we were grateful to have that much available to us. Three of the women slept in the classroom with the men (Connie and I so we could be with our husbands, and Jeanette so she could run her C-PAP machine from a l-o-n-g extension cord from the house). We unloaded the bus and put our bags and the mattresses in the school, then Don Pedro’s extended family fed us lunch of chicken, beans, rice, plantains, and tortillas on a small porch-like room off the kitchen of the house. By now we had been joined by Daniel, a young man hired by Agua Clara, and Jeffrey, another interpreter from CEPAD so it was a close, crowded grouping for meals.

We spent the rest of the afternoon completing the work required to make the water purifiers ready for installation. Sitting at school desks set-up in front of the school in the shade, we drilled and sanded and cleaned the PVC pipes and tops. By the time we finished we had 96 (not the 100 we had raised money to install) systems ready to take into the communities. We ate a dinner much like the lunch, but without chicken. The sun sets in Zompopera at around 6:30 and the only light in the school was one bare bulb that Dean had brought. As we would do each night, we met as a group to talk about our day and then opened our package for the day from our Prayer Partners from Edgewood and then got ready for bed. Marv and I each were sleeping on a CEPAD mattress and an air mattress we brought, with bed sheet “bags” I had made for us. Because of the high humidity it wasn’t very comfortable. Also, there were some world class snorers in the group and, along with the farm noises of cattle, dogs, roosters, etc., ear plugs were a necessity. All-in-all it made for a very poor first night’s sleep for me and I watched with envy as our two teenage boys climbed into sleeping bags in their clothes and promptly fell fast asleep.