Nicaragua: Part 5

Saturday, June 28: Today was to be more of a cultural experience day for us. We spent the morning at a parcela project just down the road from Don Pedro’s. The farmer here had a fascinating personal history, having been with the Contras and the Sandinistas, and had lived in Cuba and Russia. He now runs a small organic farm established with the help of CEPAD. He took us for a tour of his small farm, showing us mango, lemon, lime, pineapple, orange, yucca, plantains, bananas, and any number of other crops. He demonstrated how he plants on the hillsides, where it was steep enough to be uncomfortable to stand in one place. Then he put us to work, planting plantains and then yuccas. He and his young son laid out rows and rows of each for us to plant and we did so for an hour or so in the humid heat, until we had slowly all given up and made our way back down to the road to have bottles of coke from a tiny store across the street. It tasted incredibly delicious by then! 

Notice the many little legs under the hen's breast.
She had a whole brood under there!

This proud Tom was constantly strutting his stuff, causing Marv to caution,
"If your display lasts more than 4 hours, call your veterinarian."

Carolina translates as the farmer explains his farming techniques

Felix and the farmer

Carolina shows us a cashew as they come off the tree.

Digging the planting hole

Putting in a plantain

Marv and Hannah show off their plantain

The group gets started with the planting

The little boys found us Gringos to be pretty amusing

Enjoying our Cokes while we chat with a local high school student

After lunch at Don Pedro’s we drove a short way the other way to Santa Cruz, where we broke into two groups. The men went up the hill to play baseball with youth and men of the village, while the women stayed below for a demonstration of how they make corn tortillas and two kinds of traditional mango drinks. My stomach was still feeling queasy so I didn’t last long in the sweltering kitchen. But I sat with some others on the porch where we had a nice breeze and we chatted. When the kitchen group was finished, they all came outside and joined in the conversation. Presumably because the men were not there, we had a much better talk than the day before, with more give and take. The women asked us what a day in our lives was like and the group of children that were there sang a few songs for us. It was probably my favorite time of the whole trip. I’ll let Marv tell about his afternoon:

So when you are in the “mountains” where do you find a baseball diamond?  We climbed a steep hill that opened to an area that was the ball field. Work had been done to raise a corner of the field and make room for home plate, including a short backstop.  Right field fell away down a big hill.  Any ball hit that direction was an automatic double.  We found that the game had already started so we had a chance to watch.  These guys were good! The field was incredibly bumpy and their ability to adjust to the ball as it bounced off of one thing and then another was impressive. They also hit the ball hard and were fast. They gave us a chance to play and four of us took part, Grant, Alex, Kris, and myself. They took pity on us and slowed the pitching down considerably.  The bats were enormous and it was clear that they had been turned by someone locally and were not purchased in a store. We all got a hit, but we found that it was a very long run to first base, and the time I got to third base I found that it was an uphill run to get there. Playing the field was also interesting as the field was so rough, but we had a good time and everyone had fun.  After a couple innings we retreated to the sidelines and watched as the young men and youth continued the game they had been playing.  It was good to be included but the situation did not lend itself to conversation.

The evening plan included a campfire in the farmyard and a farewell time with the community. As it turned out, the only ones we met with were the extended family of Don Pedro. But it allowed us time to talk with the women who had cooked for us and to thank them and to learn more about the folks with whom we had been living for four days. We presented Don Pedro with a t-shirt like the group had worn and expressed our appreciation for all they had done for us.

Marv was pretty appalled at the shape of the tires on our bus

Marv gets a hit!

Shooting the breeze while enjoying a breeze

Truly a ball park with a view!

The women and girls meeting on the porch outside the kitchen

Carolina helps Felix explain more about CEPAD's work

On end of our outdoor dinner table

The other end of our outdoor dinner table

Don Pedro gets his t-shirt

Our bedroom on the last night

Nicaragua: Part 4

Friday, June 27: Today’s work was in the more uplifting community of Placeres del Coco. First we had to walk down the drive at the farm to board the bus because the off and on rain had turned the red clay into a mucky mire. As we left Don Pedro’s sons were filling the drive with gravel from a cart pulled by oxen. The farms of Placeres del Coco are stretched across the hills that line each side of the Coco River, so named for its water color. It is a wide river here and runs to the border of Honduras and to the Atlantic Ocean.  Many of the farms here had wells for household water. The heart of the community has a large community kitchen next to a church being built overlooking the river and farther up the hill was the school. A large group of people welcomed us to the village, with a tall, handsome Afro-Carib man at the front. He was clearly in charge and turned out to be the President. We found out from Carolina that there has been a lot of migration by river from the coast, leading to a more mixed population. Again the council leaders took us to the farms that were getting purifiers. Marv and Alex really hoped to be in a group that would hike farther into the countryside today. But no one else was interested in changing groups and leaving us would have left our group too small to do the work. So we stuck with the same groups. Once again our group went to the closest farms, which still meant we hiked a long ways uphill to do our installations. Our council leader was a young woman in flip-flops who carried the barrels and hiked along with no sign of effort. Our first stop was the home of an elderly woman who didn’t have water on hand so we left the materials and went on to install our next purifier, which was fast and easy. The people at this house wouldn’t let us take their picture with the purifier until they had changed clothes, and they didn’t want us to show their feet, wearing the ubiquitous flip-flops, since they didn’t have time to change into their good shoes People are the same, everywhere. On our way to the next farm we found out that the son of the woman at our first stop had brought her water so we could go ahead and complete her purifier. At one of our next stops there were a pair of twins, about a year old, and their mother and her mother. At another, they had just killed and scalded a chicken that they were then going to cook for dinner. It was so interesting to be in people’s homes and see these indications of everyday life. There was no one home at our final stop up on the hills so we left the materials, knowing that the people of the community would be able to get it set-up for them. We had circled back almost to the school and continued back to the farm closest to the community center. This was a sprawling complex of houses that several parts of the same larger family occupy.  On our way it rained a little, and while there it rained hard on their noisy metal roof. But it quit and the sun came out by the time we finished, again heating things up like a sauna.

Slowly our three groups gathered at the kitchen, where the women of the village had prepared a chicken, beans and rice (with tortillas, of course) lunch for us. Jeanette had stayed behind today because of the hiking required and so she had helped in the kitchen. When we arrived she was entertaining a group of children, telling them the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in her fractured Spanish. She has beginning to middle ability but she speaks with such animation and hand gestures that she is a delight to watch and hear. After lunch a few of us went up the hill to the school to break a piñata with the children. Most of us stayed on the porch where we had eaten, sitting in a large circle to have some conversation with the leaders of the village. We asked questions of them about their hopes and dreams for the future of their community and learned more about what CEPAD had been doing with and for them, as well as how they will carry on in the years to come, since their five years with CEPAD come to an end this year. We found out that one of our groups had been to a large fruit tree farm that CEPAD had helped establish. The women who were leaders assured us that they felt equal as leaders to the men in the association but we did notice that men were usually the ones to answer our questions. During this time Marv and Alex also attempted to hike down to the river but, lacking a clear path to get there, they stopped short of their goal. In general this association seemed more cheerful and more prosperous, which raised our spirits as well. Though the work had been equally challenging, we returned to Don Pedro’s farm in a much better frame of mind. Again the women of the family had prepared a rice and bean meal for us, which we ate gratefully before we held our circle and opened our prayer partner gifts. I knew who my exercise buddies had for prayer partners so it was fun for me to watch as Carol and Grant opened their packages. But I was still in the dark as to who had Marv or me. Once again the cold, trickling shower felt wonderful before climbing in bed. I was having some troubles with my stomach and the need for quick trips to the latrine so I was sort of dreading going to bed. But prescription meds from Jeanette and Imodium got me through the night. 

Working on the drive with a pair of oxen

Chickens were everywhere!

Plowing a field on our way to Rio Coco

Everyone had to get out and walk up the hill when the bus
bottomed out at the stream bed along the way

Countryside arriving at Rio Coco

Community kitchen and meeting room

Carolina gives directions at one of our stops

Family with their new water purifier

Farms across the river in the distance

Cute, cute kids!

Jeanette entertains kids and adults alike

Cooking fire at our last stop

Pinata that we brought to share with the kids

Jim enthralls the kids with their own pictures on his IPad

The bus made it all the way to this community and is parked
at the top of the hill while we're at the community area

Nicaragua: Part 3

Thursday, June 26: During the night, by mutual agreement, women used one side of the school and men the other for a “pee pad” rather than making the hike to the latrine in the dark. The sun rose about 5:30 and along with it the noise level of the animals so, slowly, we did too. After breakfast of packaged dry toast and jam and Special K cereal we packed up some of the water purifiers and drove the main dirt road to a side road which deteriorated more and more, and we took it as far as the bus could drive. Then half of us climbed in the back of Felix’s pick-up and drove to Chamarro, where the road ended at Don Felix’s house and the village school. While we waited for the rest of the group some of us went into the school and talked to the children and teachers a little bit. The school had three rooms—3-5 year olds, first & second graders, and third & fourth graders. The 3-5 year olds’ teacher looked to be about 13 herself but she had a child in the class along with three other kids! Connie’s Spanish made it possible for us to visit a bit and learn about the school. We also used the latrines at the school; the only ones in the community—at their homes, they all “go in the bush”.

One of the things CEPAD has done in this area is to organize the farms into village-like associations. As the leader of Zompopera, Don Pedro is sort of in charge of seven associations, each of which has its own leadership council. CEPAD requires that leadership councils include women with power and voice. Each council decides what they want to do for their community for the 5 years while CEPAD works with them. Putting in the water purification systems is one of the projects the Zompopera region wanted. All of the rocks, gravel and sand had already been delivered to the homes that were getting the systems and the leaders worked with us to show us where the homes were. They also did a lot of the “heavy lifting” along the way. The homes are not “clustered” in one area like we think of a village and some were 45-60 minutes hike away from where we began. Don Felix is the president of Chamarro so he met with us as we were shown how to put the filters together and set-up one of them in the school. Then we broke into three groups and headed out in three different directions with the parts to start installation.

Marv and I were in a group with Daniel from Agua Clara, Carolina for our interpreter, Carol, and Alex. Don Felix went with us to carry the barrels and show the way. We hiked up the hillside, over a creek and through the jungle to the first home, which was his son’s. His daughter-in-law and 2 year old granddaughter greeted us and we began our installation. As we would find with most of our installations, the support shelf where it was being installed was too high for Carol or me to be much help. The process is to put in the L shaped PVC pipe across the bottom and up the inside. Then the pipe is added which comes out the predrilled hole near the top and forms the “spigot” from which the clean water will pour. A layer of large gravel is put on the bottom, covered with water, and evened out. Then the barrel is leveled on the shelf. A layer of smaller gravel is added, covered with water, and again evened out. Half of the sand goes next with more water. A small packet of shredded copper is mixed with a bowl of sand and makes an additional layer for ionization. Finally more sand fills up to about an inch below the spigot and water to cover it. As each layer is added the sides of the barrel are pounded to “burp” the air pockets out. By the time we got to the top layer of sand the water was beginning to flow out of the spigot into a catch pail. The purifier forms a sort of “swamp” biotic layer on top and in 3 or 4 weeks the water that comes out is purified. There are no moving parts and the only requirement is that water is added twice a day and it never is allowed to dry out. The oldest ones have been installed for nearly ten years and are still working. And CEPAD has found nearly 95% being maintained on their revisits, which they do periodically to check the water purity.

It only took about 15 minutes to install that one. Then we hiked further up the hill to install our next. This was a very nice looking pueblo home. It had two rooms off an open entry way. To the left was the sleeping area and to the right, the kitchen. Like pretty much every home, there was a two level cooking stove with a fire going and the smoke exited out an open gable at the top of the wall below the roof. The woman here had a bandana covering her mouth and we found out from Carolina that she had an infected tooth that was causing her a lot of pain. While we worked Carolina tried to convince her that she needed to get an antibiotic. When we finished we hiked further up the hill until we came to what looked like a cliff. When Carolina saw that she said, “My Spanish doesn’t go that far” and she sent the men to do the installation and had Carol and me return to the house, where we chatted with the woman. As we talked, her teenage daughter returned from delivering lunch to her father in the field. We found out that the girl really wanted to go to high school but the only school is the one where we are staying and it meets on weekends. It would be an hour’s walk at least and there are drunken men along the way who make it very dangerous. A 15 year old girl had been killed just a few weeks before and so none of the families wanted their daughters to go now. She made a point of telling us that there is NOTHING in their community in the way of health services or education, repeating “Nada, Nada.” It was pretty depressing and distressing to hear her despair. I will let Marv describe what they did while we chatted:

It was a very steep climb to the top of the ridge where we found the next home.  It was very primitive compared to the others we had seen. No brick or adobe; the kitchen walls were made of one and two inch limbs lashed to a wooden frame.  The living quarters were walled with heavy black plastic.  It had a corrugated steel roof just like every other home we had seen. The view from the ridge top was wonderful, forest and farm fields all around. We did not meet the mother at this home.  The father met us and helped set up the purifier. The water for the household had to be brought up that same steep hillside from the stream below. His daughter was there--we had met her at the school earlier. Like other children we had seen she wore clean clothes and we could see freshly washed clothes hanging out on a line to dry.  She had a new puppy she wanted to show us.  It appeared to have just learned to walk. Very cute!

After setting up the three purifiers we made our way back to the school where we were supposed to meet the other groups around noon and go back to Don Pedro’s for lunch. After waiting a bit and finding no one else returning, we decided to make do with trail mix and candies we had with us and bananas from the two bunches Don Felix had picked up at his son’s house and given to Carolina. We picked up more parts from Felix and hiked up the steep road to install systems in two more homes in a cluster of three just off the road. Part of us did one while the rest of our group installed the other. There was an older woman, her son, and four boys at the house where I worked but it was unclear who lived in the house. This was a dark and dreary home and something just seemed off about it. We asked why the boys weren’t in school and the man said that there was no teacher for them, but having just been at the school we knew that wasn’t true. We stayed for more than half an hour waiting in the “yard” for Felix to come and pick us up but nothing was happening and our frustration was growing. Alex finally decided to hike back down and see what was going on. We decided that it made more sense for Felix to take our group back to the bus, since not everyone could ride in the pick-up truck at one time. So Marv and I followed Alex and convinced Felix to do just that. William was also available so we returned to the bus. We found another group there, having put in purifiers in homes near the bus. A small group of hearty souls hiked up a steep hill to put in one more purifier, getting caught in the rain on their way back. In the meantime Felix came back with the last group and we all returned, hot, hungry and very tired, to Don Pedro’s. We cleaned up a little bit, gobbled down a very welcome dinner, met briefly to talk about the frustration of the hurry-up-and-wait day and the conditions we found in Chamarro and to open our Prayer Partner gifts and collapsed from exhaustion in our beds. Sleep came much more easily that night.

Driving to Chamarro

One of the streams the bus had to ford

Loading up the truck to continue into Chamarro.
Note what the "road" has become

Connie speaking to a class ofr third and fourth graders

Don Felix's granddaughter didn't really want to get her picture taken.
Their new purifier is set up on the shelf behind her and her mom.

Beautiful faces

Daniel, Alex and Peggy climbing the hillside

View from the hillside

Farthest up house. Daniel is explaining the purifier's upkeep.
Note the wall construction. 

Coffee beans

They may have had oxen to plow this field but all other work is done by hand.

The final purifier of the day was set-up by Grant, Kris, Alex and Marv.

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.

Dolce Suega 

Loading the chicken bus

Countryside as we drove along the dirt road

The catch basin from the road over the dam

Green, lush hills

William's view of the good part of the dirt road

Looking at the laden bus in the farmyard with the farmhouse
beyond, from the porch of the school where we slept

Preparing the purifier parts on the school porch:
Nancy, Jim D., Peggy, Connie and Dean

Hannah and Grant interacting with local kids and adults

The finished parts accumulating

Sow and babies hanging out in their pen

Nicaragua: Part 1

Monday, June 23: This trip to Nicaragua was our second “Mission Trip” with Edgewood. Under the auspices of the Consejo de Iglesias Evangelicas Pro-Alianza Denominacional” (a Presbyterian group hereafter known as CEPAD) and Agua Clara we raised money to buy and install 100 water purification systems in rural farms with no access to pure water. With Marv, Kris and Jim D. driving 3 vehicles 14 of us (Marv, Peggy, Kris, Jim & Connie D., Alex, Bonnie, Hannah, Nancy, Barb & Carolyn from Edgewood plus Carol from First Presbyterian with her grandson, Grant, from Missouri and Jim from Eastminster Presbyterian) headed to Detroit Metro to meet Dean from Adrian Presbyterian and Jeanette from Southfield and fly United to Houston and on to Managua. The flights went without a hitch and we landed in Managua as scheduled. Everything from the schedule after that flew out the window. Instead of going to stay at the Nehemiah Center with the CEPAD folks, we were driven by our intrepid bus driver for the week, William, to a nice hotel called Casa San Juan. The group split into three rooms and, after a light snack of sandwiches and juice, went to bed.

Tuesday, June 24: CEPAD had arranged for 7:30 breakfast at the hotel of eggs, beans, rice and coffee with white bread toast. We gathered with Carolina, who was to be our interpreter and guide for our time in Nicaragua. She is from one of the regions on the east coast of Nicaragua and grew up speaking English, learning her Spanish in High School. Her “East Coast” mentality and allegiances are very different from the central and Pacific regions. We found out more about the reasons for that when we met for over an hour with Ayn, an ex-pat from Pennsylvania who is married to a Nicaraguan, has been there for 28 years, and is now a professor in Managua at two universities. Her fast paced, knowledgeable, and fact-filled Coyuntura gave us a wonderful overview of the social, cultural and political history of Nicaragua. Afterwards we piled into the comfortable, air-conditioned tourist bus that had met us at the airport the night before and took the scenic drive north about two hours to Jinotega. The picturesque town of about 35,000 is nestled in a valley surrounded by mountains (possibly an ancient volcano caldera?) and with relatively comfortable temperatures in the seventies. Numerous delays again played havoc with our schedule and we ended up checking into Hostel Dolce Suega (Sweet Dreams) where, with two people to a room, Marv and I were able to be together for the night. We did only one thing on the schedule for the afternoon, visiting the coffee processing facility of Juan Carlos Palma and learning about how he has become an organic certified grower and processor of fine Nicaraguan coffee. Most of us bought a bag or more of his coffee. We were joined there by the CEPAD director for the region, Felix, who has very little English and so most of his interactions for our time there were to be with the local people, Kris, or Carolina. We had dinner that evening at Los Ticos (the Costa Ricans) where we chose our meal from a buffet of food that the wait staff put on our plates before we sat down at long tables. It was very good! Afterwards the whole group did a walking tour of the park-like plaza of Jinotega before we went to bed.

Jinotega Plaza playground

Plaza band shell

Political mural on City Buildings beside the plaza 

Church across from the plaza

Part of the group eating at Los Ticos