Masaya

Saturday we decided to make a one-night trip to Granada, stopping at Masaya on the way. Masaya is known for it’s markets, with artists and vendors of all kinds. We wanted to do a quick stop over on the way to Granada, so we asked at the bus station for a bus that was headed for Granada, but would stop at Masaya along the way.

Well, lots of jostling and bustling finally got us onto a bus still empty enough for us to sit down on chairs! We bought an apple juice through the bus window from a guy carrying a bag at least as big as he was, filled with juices, water, and tons of ice. The apple juice was good. Ahh… I’d forgotten that flavor.

We sat on the bus for a while as it crossed through the city of Managua and pushed past the endless pick-ups loaded with random supplies bound somewhere, with piles of workers loaded on top, surfing their way down the streets. Eventually we ended up on a long, straight road that connects the capital city to Granada, and waited for our queue to get off.

Well, apparently we missed our stop. At one point several people in the bus started acting all anxious and motioning towards us. A quick conversation later, we find ourselves jumping off the bus (it only barely stopped) and leaving it to disappear down the road behind us. A light rain started to fall. We looked around.

“Where the hell are we?”
“Um… on a road.”
“Where’s Masaya? And the Market?”
“Um… that way, I think.”

And so we started walking. Some guys on bicycles passed us and asked us what the hell we were doing, walking along the side of the road, in the rain, obviously slightly lost, and completely aimless. Well, we figured this was all part of the adventure, so we just kept walking. People had told us that the Market was so big you couldn’t miss it. We just had to wander until we found it.

We walked until we came upon the only intersection for miles.

“Meh. Let’s turn down this one.”
“Right or left?”
“Um… well, there’s more people going left. Let’s go left”
“Aight”

And so we walked some more. Donkeys passed hauling wood. Some more bicyclists zoomed by, stopping long enough to whistle appreciative greetings to Maya and I. Oh, the joys of being young, female, and white in a country that appreciates all three of those traits so blindly. Despite being soaking wet and covered in mud that had kicked up from the street, we still managed to attract attention.

After walking for over an hour, we decided that we were definitely lost and started keeping an eye out for busses that said Masaya on them. We flagged one down only to find out we’d walked way past Masaya and her markets.

We turned back and wandered some more.

Suddenly the soft rain decided to be mean, and picked up to the level of torrential downpour. It is rainy season, after all. With about 2 seconds to save ourselves, we ran into the first place with a roof. Que suerte! A restaurant.

We ate yummy food and drank beer. For the first time in our Nicaraguan experience, we were not accosted by three different drunk men trying to sit at our table and marry us. Who knows… maybe it was the rain.

Waiting out the rain, we drank beer and more beer. Never mind that it was before noon on a Saturday. At one lucky moment, we happened to look down a narrow alley way and saw the “unmissable” market at the other end. Whoo hoo! And so when the rain settled back into it’s soft drizzle, we wandered through the thousands of stalls selling anything from onions to hand-carved African figurines to beaded jewelry made from local seeds to high fashion dresses left over from the 80s.

Rafael

Rafael lives in the bE house in Managua. His job is to stay in the house whenever no one else is there to ensure that robbers don’t come. It’s especially difficult to watch Rafael go about his day because he’s 19 years old, and there is absolutely NO stimulation for him at the house. The television has one channel, the internet doesn’t work 99% of the time, the phone costs so much to use he can’t even call his friends, and leaving the house for the 5 minutes it would take to rent a movie is prohibited. Maya and I gave him a present of some drawing paper, pens, and a how-to book on sketching since he’d expressed some interest in drawing, and we wanted to encourage him to try doing something productive with his endless days of boredom.

We also made a point of spending some time with him in the evenings. We figured he couldn’t possibly mind the company, and later discovered that he too, had plans to marry one of us. Well… actually his plan was to have one of us “older women” teach him how to kiss, but when that plan fell to pieces, he changed his tactics and made public his desire to marry one of us. Oh the joys of Nicaraguan men. Heh.

Anyway, one of our nights of hanging out and chatting resulted in us having an interesting conversation about religion, our beliefs, God, and that which we hold sacred. Rafael was spellbound by the fact that not one, but BOTH of us didn’t believe in God. We were absolutely astonished by the fact that evolution was such a ridiculous theory to him. We engaged in a heated conversation about what it is to believe in something, and the differences between our experiences in the States versus the exposure people in Nicaragua apparently get. Maya and I realized how little variation there is between religions here. They range anywhere from Evangelist to Advantist to Baptist to Catholic, but all are somehow related to Christianity and Jesus Christ. Rafael had to disagree with us vehemently, mentioning the differences between praying to God, the Virgin Mary, or to Jesus Christ, and pointed out how ridiculous the beliefs of some Nicaraguans were. Somehow this didn’t convince either one of us, as we pointed out our exposure to all the world religions as varied as Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Catholicism, and Buddhism. In a way it feels like there just less exposure to be had here, and as a result the people are not encouraged to think as critically about what it is they hear and read.

There was another volunteer here before I arrived that was deeply Evangelist and went to church every week in Bluefields. What she noticed was how literally the stories of the bible were interpreted here. She pointed out that despite her rooted beliefs in her religion, she had the perspective to understand that the stories of the Bible were simply ways to explain the world; metaphors to act as a navigating compass. And yet, the people here, never having been taught to think critically or articulate what a metaphor is, are left truly believing Adam and Eve were the first human beings, and Moses split the Red Sea.

Anyway, the conversations we had with Rafael were interesting. And, PS, we did it all in Spanish.

Managua: Two Objectives

In Managua, we had two purposes: Go to the US Embassy for a meeting with all the NGOs in Nicaragua that have American affiliations of some sort, and buy stuff in Managua that we can’t get in Bluefields.

The first objective was easy, and relatively painless. We went, we sat through lots of hours of people talking at us, ate really bad “refreshments” and schmoozed with a bunch of oldies that work for NGOs on the pacific side of the country. No one had any idea what it was like to work in Bluefields, and they all thought Maya and I were crazy for even trying. It felt like the reputation of Bluefields, at least on the Pacific Coast, was that it’s full of savages beyond the point of even trying to save (whatever they meant by “save” I’ll have no idea). We were surprised by this mentality… but then again, while in Bluefields, we’d heard more than once how dangerous and evil the people of Managua were. Apprently there isn’t much exchange between the two sides of the country.

The second objective, however, didn’t turn out to be as easy as I had thought. In Bluefields, whenever something isn’t available, or is out of stock, the immediate thought is that it’s available in Managua. “Go to Managua.” people say. “You have to get it there.”

The problem is that once you’re in Managua, there isn’t another place you can go later. It’s either you find it in Managua, or it doesn’t exist in the country. Since part of our mantra is to provide our services with local talent and local materials, we either have to find our materials in Managua or use different ones.

Now imagine a shopping list something like the following, and you might get an idea of what we were looking for: architect’s scaling ruler, laminating plastic sheets, ceiling fans, 3/8” plastic tubing, ceramic tiles, volcanic sand, egg incubator, etc. Obviously we’d have to go to a bunch of different stores, but let me give you an idea of what it is like just to find, oh, I dunno… ceiling fans.

We walk into the hardware store we have a friendship with and ask for the ceiling fans. First we’re met with a surprised stare as they check out two young white females with a quiet older Nica servant/chauffer in tow. Then another surprised stare as we ask for ceiling fans (of all things). Then we’re questioned about or marital status, our non-existent children, and our age, and asked how long we’ll be in town, and if we’re available for dinner with some guy and his friend. Finally we get around to the topic of ceiling fans again, and we’re told that yes yes, they have them, but today they don’t. Ok then… where can we get them? Our chauffer knows.

And so we drive across town for 25 minutes staring at the same statues we passed on the way out to the first place and park in front of a giant hardware store chain… three of which we also passed on the way to this particular one. We go through the routine of our marital status, age, and availability this evening again only to discover that this place too has them, but not today. When will the next order come in? No one knows, but maybe this Friday. What about the other stores with the same name and brand and everything as the one we’re in now? Can we call them and ask if they have them? No, no one knows the number. Is there a phone book? Yes, but it’s back at the house.

So we go back to the house to look at what is apparently the only phone book in the entire city of Managua. We call the other stores. Yup yup, they say. They have them in stock right now today. And so back in the car we go, across town again, to store #3 that happens to be another version of store #2. Unfortunately this giant hardware store chain closes for lunch from noon until 2, so we have to wait an hour in order to even get inside the doors. We repeat, once again, the marital-status-and-are-you-available-this-evening charade only to discover that whoever thought ceiling fans were in stock today lied, because no hay.

Yes. Shopping in Managua is like that. We had something like 8 items on our list, and it took us almost three full days of running around town with our personal chauffer just to get half of them. The rest we couldn’t find. In the case of the ceiling fans, we did finally find a few that were miraculously in our price range. We bought them, took them to Bluefields, installed them, and THEN realized that the only reason the store had them at all, let alone for the price we got them, was because they ran on 220 voltage instead of 110, so no one except the super fancy special people can even use them anyway.

El Rama

El Rama is the name of the "port city" that has both a river-way that leads to Bluefields, and a roadway that leads to Managua.  When traveling between Bluefields and Managua with the Bus/Panga combination, one stops in El Rama to grab a bite to eat and switch modes of transportation.

Now, the use of the words "port city" to describe the place is nothing short of ridiculously generous.  The "port" is a wooden pier that juts out into the river a bit.  It can house about three or 4 pangas at a time if the boats are smushed right up against each other.  Immediately past the "port" is a hill lined with stairs (probably 30 or so) that leads to the main road and bus depot.  Really, it feels more like a random town corner with a quasi-exciting existing in all four locations.  The bus depot is a roof and a bunch of benches under it.  There's a counter at one side that sometimes has someone sitting there.  Tickets are bought from random vendors on the street that wave things around in your face until you either push them out of your way, or you buy something.  Buses leave from the street corner once every two hours or so - all of them headed for the great city of Managua.

Kitty-corner to the bus depot is a "hotel" with a few rooms, and ooh la la, a BATHROOM! Since they have a monopoly on the bathroom industry for this particularly busy corner or travelers, they charge 2 cordobas in exchange for a pre-cut slice of toilet paper to accompany you on your adventure of the special room (never mind the poor souls with liquid poo... it's not like 4/5 the population is suffering from this condition at any given moment or anything).

On a third side of this corner lives a little woman and her daughter.  They have taken advantage of the unreal amount of traffic that miraculously finds themselves stuck on this corner for several ungodly and rainy hours by opening up a little restaurant.  They sell Gallo Pinto (rice and beans), corn tortillas, ensalada verde (which is really shredded cabbage with tomatoes and lime juice) with whatever form of chicken they feel like serving that day.  Granted, their only competition is a bunch of women walking around selling tortillas with goo and cream in them, and so they kind of have a captive market, but there's something to be said about real home-cooked Nica food that just warms the stomach. That the walls of the restaurant are painted a combination of bright pink and sunshine orange, and a cage-full of squawking parakeets adds percussion to the latino rock music blaring out of overtaxed loudspeakers only adds true Nica-style ambience to the place.

Maya and I arrived in El Rama after a particularly interesting Panga ride and collapsed into our chairs on the bus that wasn't due to leave for another 4 hours.  After peeling off our oversized rain suits covered in rain, brushing out the massive bird's nests that had manifested themselves in our hair, and indulging in a few chocolate chips that had the effect of brighting up the cloudy day, we ventured into the little restaurant for a hearty dinner of the best grilled chicken we'd ever had.  45 minutes later we were stuffed, and clueless as to what to do with ourselves for another 3 hours.

And then Maya stumbled upon a new gem.  A pool hall.  The fourth corner of this little intersection has a three-table pool hall with some more of that overly loud music playing, and a bunch of dudes standing around or shooting pool.  We asked about the price.  Only 3 cords a game?  Nice.  Although we'd been to a pool hall or two in Bluefields with some of the boys from the workshop, this was the first time the two of us ventured into a hall without any male accompaniment.  Since the requirements women have as part of their daily routine, the sight of two women - obviously not related and old enough to have at least a few children already - out and about disfrutando (having fun) is definitely a foreign one.  I have never felt so stared-at as we played our little games of pool, American-style.  (The rules here are way different from those in the States).  Although they didn't bother us, it was obvious all the clientele at the hall were quite intrigued by our presence.  Every shot was scrutinized and every movement we made duly noted.  Only one dude had the balls to give us some pointers as he passed by on his way to another table.  I felt a little like I was back at Gualpatara standing on the cliff in my bathing suit watching the locals snap camera-phone photos of me to show to their friends later.

Anyway, three hours passed quickly.  Both of us were decently pleased with our skills on the table, and returned back to the bus in time to eat a bit more trail mix before finally pulling out of the "town".

The Ultimate Panga Ride

Maya and I – the only American volunteers here in Bluefields right now – were sent to the US Embassy in Managua for a meeting with all the NGOs that have connections with the US. The meeting is on Thursday, but we decided to go into MGA today because we have to run a bunch of errands and whatnot before hand.

Seeing as you can either take an airplane for $130 round trip from Bluefields to Managua, or you can take a bus/panga combination for $10, we opted for the latter. The panga ride from Bluefields to El Rama is about 2 hours long, and boy oh boy, was it an experience.

Now… imagine it’s a nice hot summer day. You’ve decided to go to the beach. You have on a nice little bikini top with a pair of cute little shorts, and you’re driving along in a shiny convertible with spacious leather seats and hot wind blowing your hair back. You’re listening to your favorite tunes, and singing along once in a while. The road is straight and smooth, and you feel like you could go on for miles and miles endlessly, enjoying the simple fact of being alive. Ahhhh… how wonderful.

Now…

Replace the shiny convertible and wide leather seats with a boat crammed full of people on hard wooden benches with no backrest. Lower the temperature of the air around you about 20 degrees. Add rain. Add more rain. Change the straight, flat road with a tempestuous river that bends and dips, climbing up over the side of the boat with every blast of wind. Your bikini top and cute shorts are replaced with giant rubber pants and an oversized raincoat completely impermeable to both water and ventilation. In an attempt to escape the biting rain, you and your comrades-in-suffering pull a giant plastic sheet over the group, and as you huddle down underneath it, holding the side down against the edge of the boat, you contemplate the overwhelming scent of rat piss that has suddenly overpowered the original odor of dead fish. As you’re sitting in the front row of the boat, you have the distinct privilege of allowing your face to be pressed up against the plastic that is pushing back at you with the 45-mph winds that whip you about. Your hair is no longer blowing backwards, but forwards into your mouth and eyes. You try to tie it back, but you only have the use of one of your hands, as the other is vainly trying to hold the plastic sheet in place. Despite the wind and rain, you’re sweating inside your rain gear. You search for ways of inhaling clean air, but never succeed. Your back aches from the constant thrashing of the boat against the river and the effort required to compensate for the giant plastic sheet endlessly pushing you backwards.

Your 2-hour journey feels like a lifetime, but you arrive at your destination – which is not a beach, but a nondescript wooden plank that juts out into the river at what appears to be a completely random location – and convince your cranky back and knees to carry you onto land. Since you’re the only white person besides your friend, you’re accosted on all sides by vendors selling bus tickets to Managua. You pick the earliest bus – you only have to wait 5 hours for that one – grab your soaking wet stuff, and try to clean yourself off. Luckily you packed trail mix with chocolate chips in it. Ahhhh… how wonderful.

Climbing the Turbine Tower

Maya calls herself a quasi-obsessive climber. She entered climbing competitions in college, and every time an opportunity to climb presents itself, you find Maya mousing around checking out various possible hand-holds.

Anyway… since our week and a half of crazy construction-ing resulted in our being absolutely DEAD, we sorta took a chill day for ourselves. Having been inspired by some turbine-maintenance the workers had done on one of the turbines on campus, Maya decided we were going to climb the tower. Yay!

And so we did. Ronald and Eliot in the workshop were a little concerned that GIRLS wanted to climb it… I had to endure several repeated lessons from Ronald on how to climb and quadruple-check the harness, but eventually we got to go up.

We took some pics once we got up there.

AAAAAAhhhhh. EEk!

One of the objectives in the office reconstruction was to replace the ceiling panels that had gone to shit. It’s always a little interesting to pull back the outer layer of construction on something that hasn’t really been renovated in a while, and pulling out the ceiling panels was no exception. Maya gave me the wonderful job, and I started in the back corner with some of the worst panels.

Well, let’s just say that my grit as a woman was tested to its core. The first panel I pushed up seemed oddly heavier than expected (they’re made of Styrofoam and are actually quite light) and started wobbling because its weight wasn’t evenly distributed. Then a shower of dust and dirt started raining down on me… only it wasn’t dust and dirt. It was termites. Termites galore. I had seen their work on some of the other projects I had worked on, but never actually run into any of them. Here was a COLONY! I had little crawly termites run down my shirt and get stuck in my bra. My hair gave termite larvae a nice little bed, and my underwear caught a few more little critters. GROSS!

The not-so-wonderful part of the whole experience was that I got to enjoy the termites for the rest of the day as they scurried around indefinitely. Since the rainy season we thought had started was actually just joking with us, I got to come home to a VERY limited bucket shower of brown well-water “purified” with Clorox… NOT what I was wanted. Ugh. Even though (most) of the termites were eventually washed away, I still walked away smelling like the combination of an indoor swimming pool and pond water. Yummy, yummy day.

Anyway, we didn't get a picture of me covered in the termite masses - we seem to have made a pattern of missing all the crucial moments - but this one here was taken after I had managed to shake off most of the creepy crawlies.  You can see the heap to termites in the bottom corner of the room there, behind the desk.  It totally doesn't look at gross and creepy as it was in reality - but if you imagine that mass is actually in constant movement, then you get an idea.

Strong People

One of the most striking features of the people here in Bluefields and in the communities that we serve is the brute physical strength they all have. Logically thinking, it makes sense that people that live by producing things with their hands turn out to be really strong, but logically thinking about it, and actually experiencing it are totally different things.

The other interesting bit is that the men here, although ridiculously strong, don’t look it the way big gym-buffs from the States do. Their muscles are flat, but 1000 times more functional than all my big body-builder guy friends put together.

During the construction of the office, there were a few times when desks or ladders to stand on were in high demand – but this never stopped anyone. At one point, Ronald, the boss man of the bE workers at the workshop, wanted to check out what was going on above the ceiling, so he does a little jump, grabs one of the ceiling beams, proceeds to do a pull up until he head is well above the “bar” and then looks around for what felt like eternity, yelling instructions to people, using one hand to point at random things, and just kind of chilling. Another time he climbed up the side of the wall outside to check on the status of the security grates. We managed to get a picture of that one before it was over.

Oficina Nueva

Maya went to Managua with G in order to buy stuff not available in Bluefields, and meet with a bunch of people before returning to Bluefields with the instructions to gut and renovate one of the INATEC classrooms into a new office for blueEnergy’s base of operations.  Since bE has developed a plan to build CERCA (Centro Ecologico Regional de Capacitacion Ambiental) on INATEC’s campus, we’ve been working on both convincing INATEC that it’s the right move, and developing a design for the building and what it will represent. Maya’s main business here in Bluefields is to create CERCA in all its glory. Step 0.01 was to build the office on the campus so that it can be used as a conference room, offices, library, and whatever else it will need to be while CERCA is being built over the next couple years.

Anyway, so there was Maya, back in Bluefields, with explicit instructions to have everything done within two weeks. Getting the key to the soon-to-be-office only took four days, so suddenly she was down for 10 days of crunch time. G instructed me to put my water project efforts on hold, drop everything, and run to Maya’s aid.  Here's a pic of the room when we got it.  Those are typewriters on each desk, which apparently are super-high technology and needed to be guarded with our lives as we simultaneously ripped out everything else in that room.

Working in construction has always been especially fun for me. That’s why I gravitated towards Habitat for Humanity in college. Besides, who doesn’t love using power tools? And demolition? Don't even get me started.  The situation becomes infinitely more interesting, however, when you and your counterpart are a) the only women involved in the entire operation, b) the only two that barely speak Spanish, c) the only ones with a clear picture of everything that needs to be done, as well as a ridiculously high standard as to how it should be done, and d) the only ones with 1/10 the construction experience the rest of the crew has. We very quickly learned how to use the imperative form and how to yell things like “stop!” and “good job!”, but cultural issues ran much, much deeper. Since Maya was the designer of the project, she was essentially the boss, but being a woman with limited Spanish abilities made her job exceptionally difficult. She and I spent hours at the end of each day discussing how we’d best schedule the workers the following day, organize the timelines for each person, figure out where they’d work best, what tasks they were capable of, how quickly they’d get it done, how to best approach each worker, what to say, how to say it… the list was endless.

Another issue we dealt with daily was the need for more raw materials. We’d make lists of things we needed for the next day, but since we don’t have the authority to use bE money to buy stuff, we had to send it through Ismael, the INATEC liason, who would run around town buying stuff all morning. The difficulties were that that half the stuff on the daily lists weren’t available in Bluefields that day (who knows…) or were simply forgotten or ignored, so getting ahold of every necessary piece of equipment was a challenge. Simultaneously, we had Felix working on all the furniture (since he’s the resident wood expert) but since the wood that comes into Bluefields is wet (due to the unrelenting rain and impossible panga rides), we couldn’t use any of the stuff we bought. Maya eventually designed an entire furniture design out of plywood since that was the only dry wood available, and Felix pulled off a monster feat of actually accomplishing everything within the allotted time.

Anyway, what must have been 14-hour days ran together. As Maya and I sprinted past each other issuing orders, following up on each of the workers (we had a team of 17 for most of the week – each of which was working on something different), making sure they hadn’t hit a snafu, and checking on quality, we simultaneously threw in efforts to paint walls, hang doors, re-panel ceilings, etc. Phew! Sunday night at 1am, we pulled up the last drip of paint off the floor and secured the new door with the recently installed lock. Meetings for CERCA and the soon-to-be newly-installed curriculum of Environmental Studies at INATEC could now begin.

RAIN!!

Woah woah WOAH! My definition of a summer storm has suddenly been ripped to shreds by giant bolts of lightning and earth-shattering strikes of thunder. Last night it rained so hard for so long there were times I wondered if we were experiencing a hurricane. Bluefields is famous for hurricanes, after all. I couldn't even hear any dogs!

But this morning, the day had settled itself into a pattern of heavy showers and occasional, not-earthquake-inducing thunder rolls. According to the volunteers, we've officially entered the rainy season. Between now and when I leave at the end of September, it will supposedly get more and more rainy. I'm not sure how that's going to happen seeing as this was the worst summer storm I've ever lived through... but we'll see.

Dancing Dominos

Tuesday turned out to be one of the coolest Bluefields experiences to date.  Somehow, for some reason, blueEnergy decided to have a party and co-host it with Bluefields Sound System.  It was especially interesting because we managed to figure out a way to get BSS to host the thing, so all we had to do was show up.

It turned out to be a really interesting crowd because we had all our extranjero voluntarios and a whole bunch of local BSS musicians and artists - the people BSS is trying to promote.  There was the occasional impromtu music concert, lots of beer, some local pharmeceuticals, and a set of Dominos.

Now, Dominos in Bluefields is like a religion.  People play it the way people in other countries play Chess or Go.  It's a delicate game of balance and manipulation.  When I saw the table of players in the corner of the balcony, I went over to watch a few hands, and quickly decided the game was kinda boring... but then I somehow got roped into playing, and suddenly the world of Dominos opened up.  There's a slow rhythm to the game - a pulse or beat - that you have to sculpt with a gentle hand in order to win.  The best way to play the game is with four players, where players sitting across from each other are team members and try to help each other out.  After a few hands, I started to catch on, and Moses (a local Rasta) and I became table champs for a good hour or so.

Whoo hooooo!  I've decided Dominos is my new favorite game.

Anyway, eventually we had to lose, and so I left the table to rejoin the rest of the festivities.  We danced and danced - I learned a few moves from Julie, who's been studying with the Spirit Dancers here in town (who knew your body could move like that?) and enjoyed being one of the three girls in the room (every time we go out I notice the distinct dearth of women out and about - there's something about children and staying home and cooking...).

The party was particular in it's chemistry, and I left that night feeling like I'd really felt what it was like to live in Bluefields like a local; local friends, local music, local dances, and local games.  Yay for Bluefields!

Laundry Day

I read nursery rhymes as a kid that talked about the different days of the week, and their specific purposes.  I remember one day was market day, and one day was bathing day.  One day was always laundry day too.  I never really understood why the days were delineated the way they were, because I would think about how you didn't really need a whole day to do each of those tasks. 

I never really understood, that is, until I suddenly found myself living it.

Today was laundry day for me.  The ladies in the kitchen here are also responsible for cleaning and laundry, but they're notorious for being a bit rough on the fancy materials, so we're encouraged to do our own laundry if we're particular in any way.  Since I'm obsessed with my underwear which is NOT on the cheap side, and I'm also picky about how stretched-out my cotton tank tops become, I figured it wouldn't be that much of an issue to just do my own laundry.

Well, laundry is done on a special table.  It's got a basin for clean water, and a little scrubbing pad to scrunch your clothes against as you pour soapy or clean water over them.  It is NOT easy getting stains out of your clothes that way - especially when you're like me and hopelessly trying not to ruin the stretch and pull of the materials your abusing.

Here's a picture of Barbara doing laundry...

Gualpatara

All this week we had training for the locals operators in the communities that we serve.  That means we shipped in all the people from Monkey Point, Pearl Lagoon, Set Net Point, Punta de Aguila, and everywhere else that we have turbines set up, and had them sit through a week-long class training them up on all that is the blueEnergy system.  This was a really cool to finally get off the ground - it's something that we've been talking about doing for several years, and finally Marie made it happen.  We even have an official operator's manual and everything.

Anyway, as a result of having all these people in Bluefields, we gave the kitchen staff a break and ordered in catering from INATEC.  The catering service was cool (albeit rather un-inventive) but they made us go to the workshop in order to eat.  As a result, there was an unprecedented amount of mingling between operators, volunteers, and local workers.  Since Maya, the newest addition to our volunteer corps, also happens to be a super cute female, the two of us have become fast friends (partly as a self-preservation / protection technique, and partly cause she's super cool).  We got to talking with a bunch of the workers, and discovered (FINALLY) that there's a little swimming hole hiking distance from casa blueEnergy!  Who knew?!?!

Well, obviously Maya and I were sold on the idea of being able to submerge ourselves in clean, running, cold water seeing as it's hot and sticky here ALL the time, and dusty to boot.  We made plans to go with a bunch of the locals, but plans never really materialize, and we ended up just going with Lâl (he said he knew the way, and we didn't wanna wait any longer for the workers... "Nicaragua time" sometimes means "never").

Well, the hike was interesting since Lâl had been there before - but not this year.  The paths change every year depending on who's build a new house, or where the hurricanes washed out the trail the previous year.  We managed to make it there eventually, but we were definitely REALLY hot and sticky by the time we arrived.  Never before had clean cool water been so appetizing.

I stumbled upon an interesting cultural experience while enjoying the water as well.  The women here aren't big on using bathing suits.  They tend to swim in whatever clothes they have on instead.  I don't think this is a modesty issue as often their clothes are white, and when wet, entirely see-through (boys, they wear underwear... stop getting ideas).  I think it's more an issue of just not bothering with buying/owning/maintaining swim suits.  Who knows?  In any case, Maya and I found ourselves to be BIG attractions and conversation points for all the other swimmers at the swimming hole.  When I was down to my suit and standing on a cliff preparing myself to jump into the water, I had about 5 different camera phones focused on me with both girls and guys pointing, giggling, and chatting.  I never thought I could be that interesting.  Lâl mentioned that maybe I should swim with my clothes on too, but I was too hot and sticky and dirty to want to do that.  Maybe next time, I told him.

Anyway, an hour of hanging out in the water, jumping off the cliffs, avoiding rocks, and getting scared by locals swimming up to us under the water and nipping at our legs, we were sufficiently freezing enough to begin our journey home.  Lâl wanted to show us some other parts of the city, so we took a different route home.  This was the first time I walked around the city away from the roads, and discovered how much of Bluefields I had been totally unaware of before.  Bluefields has roads upon which the taxis and trucks run, moving people and cargo around the city.  Cement houses and shops line the streets on both sides, causing the city to appear as if it's all visible from the street.  In reality, however, there are little pathways that cut away from the road towards large plots of little wooden houses built practically on top of each other.  Every several houses or so is a well that is used communally.  Laundry lines criss cross your line of sight, and pigs, chickens, and dogs run around freely.  What appeared to me to be a decently set-up, quasi well-off city suddenly showed itself to be substantially poorer than I'd originally thought.  I could suddenly see the deficiencies in sanitation and water purity I've been reading about, and see right into the one-room houses filled with 7 children playing with a bicycle tire.  I became really self-conscious of the two-story nicely-painted cement sky-scraper that I live in here.  Gosh, even my bucket shower is a luxury.

Los Cayos Perlas

"Tropical Island Paradise" only sounds more beautiful when you've actually experienced it in real life.  This weekend I went with a bunch of the volunteers to Los Callos Perlas (otherwise known as the Pearl Keys).  The Keys are little teeny tiny islands in Pearl Lagoon, north of Bluefields.  In order to get there, we had chartered a Panga to Pearl Lagoon (the "city), then took off again for a particular Key that Lâl had in mind (did I mention that Lâl, Maïte, Mathias, and other big-shot important blueEnergy people are here for strategic planning meetings, some face time, and general milestone marking?). 

We had to wake up at the ungodly hour of 5:30, which manages to be hot here anyway.  Then we set off to the docks, sat around for a bit, got in a boat, and were off.  We randomly met this Quebecois girl who fit right in with the rest of the group considering I was the only one there that wasn't either Canadian or French (and the only one, therefore, who didn't speak French).  Nonetheless, the day was perfect.  I got to take a nap in a hammock on a perfectly pristine tropical island, watch the others play bocce ball with coconuts or practice random synchronized swimming routines in the water, and eat tropical fruit all day...  Is there anything better than that?

Here are some pics:

Obviously tropical island paradises have coconuts and machetes... what would they be without them!?  I probably ate 6 coconuts that day.  Here's me struggling with one of them.

Hanging out in the hammock.  You can see the back end of the island in this picture.  The island was probably a 20 minute walk around the whole circumference.  In this picture, Mattieu is chillin with Maïte and Claude, the Quebecois girl we picked up on the way.  She was just a random backpacker we invited along.  She kept giggling about how perfect this island was, and thanked us a thousand times for inviting her along.  She was super fun - she even played underwater rugby with the boys when the rest of the girls were sleeping on hammocks.

Andrea teaching Max about synchronized swimming.  This was an absolutely hilarious spectacle to watch.  At one point they'd actually put together a little routine and performed it for us.  Take notice, btw, of the tranquility of the water.  On top of that, the sand underneath the water was super spongy and SO nice to walk on.  Aahhhhh.

Lâl and Francois playing Bocce ball with Coconuts.  Yup... I was surrounded by the French.

Did I mention it was a tropical paradise?  It seriously doesn't get more pristine than this.

In the chartered Panga.  From left to right: Lâl, Maïte, Francois, Maxime, Charles, Andrea, and two random driver people that we hired.

There are more photos available on Facebook if you're connected to that network

Water Filters Abound

After the craziness and stress of the UNDP presentation, I was allowed to partake in the water-filter training that we also have going on this week.  Andrea, a consultant for CAWST, a Canadian-based firm that trains NGOs on water filtration, sanitation, and creating a successful project, is here in Bluefields this week providing a seminar for a few blueEnergy volunteers, employees, and partners.  Andrea has turned out to be especially cool - she speaks four languages damn near fluently, lives in Calgary, and is super cute!

Anyway, I've had the chance to really get my hands dirty with the water filter effort.  Since Bruno is leaving on Saturday, he wants to transfer all his knowledge and make sure that his last 6 months of energy don't go to waste because his project fell flat, so he planned this seminar right around his take-off date to make sure the momentum was in place.

What we've been working on some more is really perfecting the process of creating these filters.  I've already posted pics of our attempts at our first filter, but that one only half-succeeded.  Since then there have been 5 more attempts, and each time we get closer - but still no cigar.

This is another attempt at a filter. We've put the cement in the mold, and now just have to wait for it to sit before extracting it.

After 24 hours of letting it sit, the cement is both solid enough to remove the mold and have it not melt into a puddle, but soft enough to still come out of the mold.  The trick is making sure not to screw it up.  Here Octavio, Danny, and Charles are flipping the mold over to put the filter upright.

The guys then attach the extractor which screws into the inner piece of the mold and should pull it up slowly with a crank.

Here they go, cranking away.  This is actually uber hard to do.  We need about 4 strong dudes just to crank it around a bit.  Once it gets far enough out, they can lift it the rest of the way - but just the weight of the mold is itself quite heavy.

So this filter got stuck to the inner mold, and we had to break it out in order to save the mold.  Unfortunately.  We were very sad, since this was the first amazingly formed cement.  Damn... the grease wasn't enough.

Yay! A filter that worked. We managed to get it out of the mold, fill it with water, and have the water come out - meaning that the water tube was also in good condition. Schwweeeeet!

After two days of drying, the filter was ready for us to add the sand column on the inside.  Here you can also see the plastic splash guard that will prevent buckets of water from disrupting the delicate eco-system that is supposed to develop in the sand.

Putting sand into the filter.  This sand had to be pre-washed... although not for the reasons you would think.  "Washing" sand really means just taking out the smallest particles of the sand.  We actually want the biology (whatever there is) in the sand to be there because it helps to eat up all the bacteria and parasites that will come into the filter with the water.  The only reason we wash the sand is to make it slightly easier for the sand to pass through it - this decreases the absolute effectiveness of the filter, but makes it more practical.  If it takes three days for the water to pass through the filter, no one will want to use it.

After filling it with sand, we have to test the water flow.  A flow that's too fast means that we washed the sand too much, and the water will not be filtered properly.  A flow that's too slow means the sand wasn't washed enough, and although the filter will be effective, it won't be practical.  The trick is to find the balance.

Clean water! Whoo hoooo!

Presenting to the UNDP

Tuesday was an uber high-stress day that was exactly how I had imagined all my days on the ground here in Bluefields would be like.  It was super crazy, but also exciting.  Sunday night we received word that our contact with the UNDP in Nicaragua had finally managed to convince the organization to take a look at our operation and figure out a way for them to help us.

Of course, that meant that we suddenly had to scramble to put together a presentation, a tour, and somehow simultaneously appear to be super organized, and effortlessly professional.  HA!  Well Guillaume, Ben, Julie and I sat in our little Bluefields Office Headquarters and hammered out a presentation (in spanish, I might add) that talked about where we've come from, what we're doing now, and our 5-year implementation plan, mentioning of course, that we need close to $7M to do it right.  Fun fun fun.

Tuesday night came around, and we were running numbers up until 3 minutes before the UNDP was supposed to arrive.  We managed to get the kitchen staff to put together a little coffee and cookies tray for the presentation (since it was happening at the workshop) before starting on their preparations for dinner.  Did I mention we had offered to host the UNDP for dinner too?  Also, the workshop was frantically being cleaned and polished in the background, and certain select locals were chosen to appear busy while our tour was going on.

Anyway, the event was a huge success.  We gave a tour where local employees gave an overview of their section of the workshop - what they were working on at that moment, and how it fit into the larger picture.  We showed off the turbines that we are using to provide energy for the workshop, and then we finished in our little classroom where Guillaume gave our banged-out presentation.  Whoo hoooo!

Then it was back to the house for a super-nicaraguan meal and lots of Flor de Caña (that's awesome Nicaraguan rum, by the way)... and the real substance of schmoozing.  Thank god Guillaume's so good at it.

Here are a few pics...

Here's a good chunk of the group during the tour of the workshop.  There's local employees, volunteers, UNDP peeps, random professors from UMich who happened to hear about us and were interested, and Guillaume all mixed in there together.  At this particular point in the tour, Seb was explaining the stators, and the actual electricity production inside the turbine.  And yes, that's me in the back, center there - and no, I'm not pissed, even though I look it.  Apparently I've developed a habit of giving this kind of pissy stare whenever I listen to Spanish really closely.

Dinner with the bigshots.  The kitchen staff even managed to throw together matching table cloths and everything!  We were also lucky enough to have Lâl here - the guy in charge of the French operations of blueEnergy - in time for the presentation as well.   He works full time for the civil service in France, but spends every other waking moment he has left over on furthering the vision of bE.  The next step for him and for the French arm is to open up a point of operations in Africa based as much as possible on the model we've implemented here in Bluefields.

Step Two: Cleaning Sand

Creating the cement casing was step one of building a water filter.  Step two is preparing the inside of it - a whole crap-load of sand.  The general idea is that the sand will pull out all the impurities of the water as it travels down the length of the filter, and reach the bottom all nice and drinkable.  The problem is, the sand we put into the filter has to be very very fine, and clean... unlike the sand that you purchase at the sand-store.

	Bruno had rigged up a 3-tier sieve that separates the sand into four sizes.  The giant pieces from the top layer were tossed - they were mostly fist-sized rocks, random pieces of glass, sticks the size of fingers, and other wierd objects you'd never expect to find in "sand".
	The small stones that were separated in tier 2 of the sieve were saved for adding to the cement mixtures in the future.  Apparently a certain amount of small stones is preferable in cement-making.
	The finer stuff was a little more complicated to sieve.  Because store-bought sand it wet (seriously... why?) it wouldn't sift through the finest sieve, so we had to help it along a little by pushing it around.  This did wonders for the skin on my hands - although it wasn't so great for my valiant (albeit useless) attempt to maintain my self-administered manicure from the night before.  Nevertheless, the "rough sand" separated out at this layer was washed and set aside for the main body of the cement mixtures later.
	The finest granularity of sand is what will eventually end up in the filters.  Today, all we did was collect it.  Tomorrow we will wash it and pack it into the cement casing.

The Dirty Business of Clean Water

Bruno, our resident water expert, is on his way out in a few weeks, so his priority at this point is to transfer his knowledge to a new volunteer in order to preserve the momentum of his work.  Lucky me, I get to be the sponge.  Today, Bruno was ready to build the beta model of the water filter he's designed over the course of the last 6 months, so Francois and I got to go along and help him out.

	Here are the pieces of the mold we will use to pour the cement into.  The filter is essentially a long skinny cement bucket filled with sand.  The piece on the left is the "center" of the mold, and the other two are the sides.  These are made of steel, and extremely heavy.
	We had to create a kind of "spout" that would carry the water at the bottom of the bucket through the cement filter out to the other side.
	Before pouring in the cement, we had to make the mold extremely slippery with lots and lots of grease.  Yumm.
	After mixing together the right proportions of sand, cement powder and water, we started dumping it into the mold.  Every so often we'd stop shoveling and push a dowel down the sides to help settle the cement.
	In order to settle the cement some more, we had to hammer the outside of the mold a bunch.
	Leveling off the cement... The 'top' of the whole thing here is actually the bottom at the end of the day, so we had to make it as level as possible.

Pobre Perritos

Two days ago we were fortunate enough to find perritos otherwise known as tiny little doggies.  They're unbelievably teeny - probably less that 3 or 4 weeks old and I've suddenly become wildly aware of how much harder it is to survive in a place as isolated as Bluefields.

I thought the poor things were so adorable that I immediately set about doing research on how to take care of baby pups that have lost their mother before they are completely weaned (she was hit by a car).  Websites advise things like "feed the puppy milk with a bottle several times a day" and "keep the puppy warm by placing it by a heater".

HA!

First of all, we don't have bottles out here in Bluefields - let alone milk that isn't powdered.  I looked up the nutritional value of powdered milk for puppies, and not surprisingly, it's less than wonderful.  Then finding a heater is obviously a little difficult in a country that never dips below 25°C, even though 25°C is not considered warm enough for a puppy without a mommy.  The general consensus we eventually came to was that we would blend up some food for the poor things, and hope they could handle it.  We made it liquid-y, but didn't have a bottle to feed them with, so getting it into their bodies was up to them.

It's now been three days.  The little boy-doggie has already died (and believe me, a dead puppy is even more difficult to deal with than a flapping, headless chicken - even if I was more actively involved with the chicken-decapitation than with the puppy-starving).  The little girl-doggie is still hanging in there.  According to the vet, it'll be in the clear in a few weeks.  Let's hope she can make it that long.

A Night Out in Bluefields

So last night was the first time I went out in Bluefields and experienced what the "city" has to offer in terms of nightlife. We started at a bar on the top of a hill called La Loma. This bar is really just a giant gazebo with a thatched roof, and no walls (who needs walls when it's invariably 29°C?). We sat around and drank nicaraguan beer while a live band played some random tunes. This was particularly interesting because the place had no lights what-so-ever... just a few candles and the ambient light from the surrounding night. Watching a band in almost-complete darkness is definitely a new experience... it brings out the 'musical' aspects of the band, I guess.

Then we went off to Cuatro Hermanos (or Four Brothers, depending on which language you speak here). Cuatro Hermanos is essentially a night club, but really it's a giant bar where they turned all the lights off, and the music up past the decibel level the speakers can handle. Since the speakers were blown, and you couldn't see a thing, the place had this kind of dungeon-y allure that brought out a special kind of mood in the clientele. I have never seen more overtly sexual dancing before in my life (except for maybe the wind-and-grind dances from high school). There was one woman, probably 300 pounds, who was GETTING-DOWN with the guys she danced with... they would invariably wind up laying on the floor with this crazy woman riding them like a bull. The guys would actually pump themselves up to dance with her, and come back from the experience changed men.

I enjoyed the specific privilege of being the sole white female in the entire club of carribean-blacks, so despite being completely overwhelmed with the sexuality of the dancing surrounding me, I also had to fend off the vampire-like men that clawed at me in an effort to taste new blood. Needless to say, I spent most of the night looking for the protection of my fellow volunteer friends (and only other white people in the place) but they were all off getting jiggy with locals, doing the boy-thing I guess... A word to the wise - never go to a dance club with a group of boys if you're the only girl. It never bodes well. Anyway, being so aware of my skin color was a new feeling, and interestingly quite scary. Next time I choose to jump into a distinct position of minority, I think I'll do it in a place that isn't dark and full of sex-charged men three times my size.

The Return Home

Our original plans to return to Bluefields on Sunday were shot down when our boat-driver and guide both decided that Sunday was a "day of rest" and didn't want to go out.  Why this was suddenly decided after we had already made specific plans to leave on Sunday was a mystery to us, but hey, what the hell.

We spent Sunday doing absolutely NOTHING.  It was an incredible feeling to be able to do absolutely nothing, and not feel guilty about it.  Usually doing nothing comes at the cost of putting off doing something... but out there, at the end of the world, doing nothing really means having nothing to do.

And so I sat in the hammock.  I read a bit about buddhism (something that seemed oddly fitting seeing as I was sitting in a hammock at the end of the world), and killed a chicken.

Monday morning (and my morning, I mean 3am) found us all packed, dressed, and ready to move.  The sand flies were exceptionally frisky - those damn things - and decided to chomp into my feet like it was Thanksgiving.  Only an hour-wait later (yes, time is not really of the essence here) a boat showed up, and we all got it.

Taking a teeny tiny boat out onto the ocean in the middle of the pitch-black night was a little creepy.  I had no idea how we were going to be able to see a thing, especially considering that the moon was still non-existent.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the plankton in the water played a nice little trick, and as soon as the boat started moving, they lit up like a carnival.  We literally steered our way through the waves using the flashing plankton as our guides.  The 5-hour boat ride turned out to be pretty uneventful, other than the sunrise we got to watch along the way.

Arriving back in Bluefields was like coming back to civilization.  I did take a minute to realize that suddenly a bucket-shower was a luxury instead of an inconvenience, and the fact that I could sit on the toilet seat and actually take my time was worth appreciating.  Three days in Monkey Point had suddenly shifted my priorities so much further to the left.

Friends Forever

One of the most striking differences between my life in NYC and the life I observed in Monkey Point was the human connections that exist when there's an utter lack of pretty much everything else.  In Monkey Point, it gets dark around 6pm or so... and dark doesn't mean that the sun just isn't there... it's absolutely 100% pitch black dark.  I was lucky enough to be in Monkey Point during the new moon, so at night I couldn't even see my own hand in front of me.  People use headlamps and flashlights when they need to get around, but mostly they just sit around and chit chat in the darkness.  Since there's not even a radio (let alone a TV) to provide mindless entertainment, they're forced to occupy themselves with each other.

Additionally, they've lived through everything together, and invested so much in each other's lives.  Every guy that owns a house had the entire community help him build it.  When we lowered and raised the turbine tower, all the men pitched in their strength.  I even heard a story from one of the guys about how he'd known Pito since the civil war (think Reagan era in the US) because Pito had led him and his friend from Monkey Point all the way to Costa Rica on foot.

As a result, I noticed that the guys I hung out with were friends on a level that ran much deeper than I've seen in a long time.  They seemed to have a certain respect for each other that only comes with knowing someone more intimately than he knows himself.

Punta de Aguila

Today we went to Punta de Aguila, another community that we serve.  This community is interesting in that it's composed almost entirely of the Rama people - an indigenous group that dates back to pre-cristopher-columbus days.  Sebastian had to check up on the maintenance status of the turbine and tower there, but I was going along simply as a guinea pig to test out one of the activity suggestions for the EcoLodge business plan: an excursion to Punta de Aguila.

We took out our trusty little dug-out canoe and braved the ocean waves for about half an hour before coming upon another perfect, empty beach with a random cow chewing on some foliage.  A quick hike and a few pigs and chickens later we came up to a house.  On the porch was this really old dude, who probably looked a lot older than he really was, who was using his machete (everyone here has machetes, by the way) to whittle down a giant piece of wood into the shape of an axe handle.

Now, machetes around here consist of a small black handle that fits in the palm of your hand, and a blade between 2 and 2.5 feet long made out of some kind of metal that is both flexible and strong.  The men carry it around them like I carry around pens or gum.  So here's this really old dude, hacking away at a piece of wood (probably a 4x4 measuring 5 feet in length) with a giant knife-like thing - and using an impossible amount of precision, skill, and patience.

Next to him sits a little baby playing with chickens.

I sat and watched him for a while, but could hardly communicate with him, as he spoke a native language and only a few spanish words.  And to be honest, after observing him for 45 minutes and seeing only a 1% improvement on the shape of the handle, I was getting frustrated and impatient myself.  I have no idea how he managed to stay so calm.

To Kill a Clucking Bird

Yes... that's right.  I had to kill a chicken.  The people of Monkey Point were being particularly extravagant with their meal-making while the rich, white, out-of-towners were on the Point doing what they do... so we had a chicken every night for dinner.  The first night I just ate the food - that was the extent of my involvement with the dinner-making process, but by the third night on the Point, they decided it would be fun to make the white girl kill the little clucker.

AAhhhhh.  Bird hearts beat at lightning speed, and when you're holding a freaked-out chicken in your arms, you can imagine it's poor little beater is pumping as hard as it pretty much can.  I had to slice his neck with a knife that was SORTA sharp... it required a few back-and-forth strokes before he was officially decapitated, and then hold the headless carcass for another 4 or 5 minutes while the poor thing flapped and bled away.  Oh my god.  I felt like I had to do some kind of spiritual cleansing afterward.  I have officially decided that I want to have nothing to do with the killing process of my food ever again.

Unfortunately the pics of me actually committing the deed aren't on the cameras I've managed to steal photos from - only the first one posted here, with me holding the bird, and being offered the murder weapon.  I did manage to get some pics of the process from the other days, however.  This pic, on the left, is of three people holding down the flapping, spasing chicken several minutes after it had already been decapitated.  Above is of Pito using a sawing motion.  God, I can still hear the bones grinding.

Pito kept telling me that I had to stop feeling sorry for the food.  One day I may forget the horrifying experience of committing murder, but I can tell you one thing... I still feel sorry for the food.

The Accomodations

Monkey Point doesn't have much, but what it does have is a guest house for all the random people that come through, and all the single men that don't yet have houses to live in because they haven't built them, or haven't really figured out a way to make a living yet.  Nonetheless, this house is basically empty except for a giant pole in the middle from which you can hang a hammock, and a kitchen in the back where you can cook some food.  Seeing as we were guests, we got first pick on where our hammocks went, and which chickens to kill for dinner and such, but pretty much all the single men hung out at the place the whole time as well.

Surprisingly enough, hammocks are actually quite comfortable to sleep in.  They're cool, suspended above the ground so no lizards, rats, or scorpions can get to you, and you can still stick a mosquito net over them.  The key is to get one wide enough that you don't worry about flipping out of them in the middle of the night.  Additionally, the hammocks that are traditionally sold in the states - little weave numbers - are absolutely pointless here because they mold when they get wet, dig into your skin when you sleep on them, and don't protect you from the mosquitoes one bit.  The best hammocks are actually made of tarp - but they tend to shrink over time.  Oh, the glories of hammocks...

As for the food, although it wasn't as varied as most diets, it still managed to be quite good.  Every meal we had bread of some sort - either deep fried or "baked".  It basically tasted a lot like the bannock we had camping in Canada... flour, water, sugar, some baking soda, and if we were lucky, some coconut shavings to sweeten the dough.  We also had some sort of meat or fish as well.  The fish we got on the days when the men woke up early to go fishing and managed to bring back a bit extra.  Otherwise we'd kill a chicken or something.  Usually it was deep fried (they love their oil here) or put into a sort of stew-like mash.  This pic is of the fried bread and fish we had one morning.  The lime is pretty much a universal topping for the food because it flavors the food while killing of a few bacteria here and there.

A Scorpion

My initial tour of Monkey Point ended at the school house where all the kids were getting handouts from some church-charity group that was there.  They were all getting backpacks and notebooks and stuff (and interestingly, recorded versions of the bible in english and - who would have thought - Farsi... I'll talk about these bibles later).  I was sitting around enjoying the sun, and watching all the absolutely adorable kiddos getting their presents and being excited.  Some of the older kids were bored and wandering around outside.

Suddenly there was a big to-do, and a few of the kids ran over to Pito and I.  They were holding sticks like chopsticks, with a writhing scorpion between them.  From my memories of "Honey I Shrunk the Kids," I had imagined scorpions to be the size of lobsters or something... but apparently they're not.  They're closer to the size of the palm of your hand.

Nonetheless, the kids and Pito were running about - apparently the sting of a scorpion is extremely painful and can even cause pancreitis - things that are no fun to deal with when the doctor comes to town only once a month.  They pinned the scorpion against the floor and started hacking at the tip of it's tail until it's stinger had been neutralized.  Then it was all fun and games.  They all thought it would be great to have me play with the thing, so I had to take it in my hand and let it crawl around.  AAAhhhhh.  They were right, however, in that it was utterly harmless at this point.  Unfortunately, my camera wasn't with me, so the pictures are on the cameras of the church-charity people.  Maybe I'll get them, but I doubt it.

... to the end of the world

Today we left for Monkey Point.  We are developing a partnership with a dude that lives there, Pito, who wants to set up an eco-tourism business where he brings backpackers or other tourists from Bluefields to Monkey Point to explore the native community, get to know about the way the people there live, and maybe spend some money in the local economy.  My job on this trip to Monkey Point was to gather as much information about what he has in mind for this mini-business, and to simultaneously take notes as a first-time tourist visiting the place.

Well, the first obstacle was actually getting there.  Monkey Point is located south of Bluefields on the pacific coast of Nicaragua as well.  The easiest way to get there is by boat, since roads don't really exist outside of the confines of Bluefields itself.  Now, when I say boat, I don't mean a nice big power-ferry that churns up the water and gets you there in five seconds.  I mean a little hollowed out canoe-type thingy with a motor stuck on the back.  Like this one...  We piled the boat high with all our stuff, and set off on a wild, wet adventure.

Navigating the ocean waves is not an easy task when they're looming twice as high as the side of the boat.  For 4.5 hours, the driver at the back of the boat had to speed up, slow down, angle into or out of a wave, and simultaneously attempt to actually get us closer to our destination.  We were all sitting on little wooden planks wedged into the boat, soaked to the bone because of the splashing about, and taking turns bailing out the water that threatened to sink us.  At one point I noticed a bamboo plug that had been stuck into a hole in the bottom of the boat, and decided it was probably better if I didn't ask if there were others like it.

Nevertheless, we arrived at our destination in one piece.  Granted, we were sore, soaking, cold, and a little miserable... but that's just the way things are out here.

The Bluefields Environment

I got ahold of a camera and took some pictures of the place in Bluefields where the volunteers live and work. Here are a few...

	This is dinner time with the volunteers. From left to right around the table, it's Marie, Julie, Francois, Charles, Bruno, Stephanie, Max, Ben, and two locals that live down the street - we often have random guests over.
	This is the office where we get our computer-stuff done. This room is by far the fanciest in Bluefields - there's AC, and enough computing power to impress pretty much any nicaraguan.

Off to Monkey Point!

It's 6am on Friday morning. I've been awake since 4:20 listening to the roosters going insane. The past few days I was confused as to why I kept hearing rooster calls in the middle of the day since I was under the impression that they crow at sunrise. ... and this time I was awake at sunrise. Damn those creatures are crazy. No wonder the farmers wake up to them.

Anyway, the reason I'm up so early is that I'm on my way to Monkey Point. Monkey Point is one of the communities the blueEnergy serves. My job for the next few days is to talk to one of the locals who's interested in setting up a micro eco-tourism business. blueEnergy is interested in facilitating the growth of micro-business because businesses are the most reliable customers for our energy that we can have. A business would have an invested interest in maintaining the systems we install because it will depend on it. One of the problems we've encountered is that the accountability of the local people charged with sustaining the system in our absence is less than desired. Having a micro-business rely on our system would increase the probability that it is well-maintained. Additionally, a business would be able to pay for our services - something that is essential to the economic viability of our projects.

So off I go. I won't be posting anything for a few days, but I'm sure I'll have thousands of things to write about when I return. I mean, c'mon... we're bringing hammocks to use as beds.

The First Day of Real Work

Today I felt like I was back in NYC. My first day on the job was basically a day of orientation. I had a meeting with Guillaume (the big boss man here) and talked about where the organization is heading, how my skills can plug into the organization's vision, what I hope to do/learn, and blah-beh-di-blah.

I spent most of the day talking to the different volunteers already here, and figuring out what exactly it is that they do. One girl is focusing on formalizing the training of the volunteers, the local talent, and the coordinators in the communities that we serve. A guy is trying to figure out what kind of water filter is both most effective and most practical to build here (with local import restrictions, material restrictions, knowledge restrictions, cost restrictions....) and how we can make them affordable enough to sell to the local community members. Another guy's focus is the technology of the turbines. He's the tech guru, and knows everything about the turbine and the wind flow. Another guy is the electrician dude. He knows all about how to convert the energy from the turbines into something appropriate for storing, and how to store the energy in the most effective way.

It appears that I'm the only volunteer here that has any experience in the corporate world. Guillaume mentioned a few ideas he had about plugging me in on the logistics/business/processes side of the organization since I've been a part of a large multi-national organization, and could help with developing policies and processes for blueEnergy.

Who knows... we'll see. Tomorrow I have a meeting with the CEO in Cali, and we'll discuss some more.

As for the water situation... we got the fire men to come and fill our cistern today, so we have enough water for a few days now. The pump in the well went out because the water in the well dropped so low that the siphon was lost. Fixing the pump required Guillaume to be lowered into the well (a good 50 feet down) to fiddle around a bit. When we discovered there was only a few feet of water left, we pumped it all out so that Guillaume could clean out the silt from the bottom of the well (who knew you were supposed to do that once a year?) and get it ready for the rainy season (which apparently starts next month or so).

Anyway, dinner smells good again today... I'm definitely not going to mind having french cooks all over the place!

Arriving in Bluefields

Woo hoooo for 3rd world airlines! I took a flight from Managua to Bluefields yesterday that was by far the scariest flight I will probably every take in my life. There were a few times when a girl in the back of the airplane screamed out loud because the nose of the airplane pointed down a little too much for comfort, and everyone's stomach got to go on a little roller coaster ride the whole entire way. I found my own knuckles to be white a few times, but hey, we made it in one piece, and this time none of my luggage was stolen in transit.

The blueEnergy house is a giant 2-story cabina with an office/den/kitchen downstairs, and a whole slew of bedrooms equipped with bunks upstairs. There's a cook and a maid that look after the house, make sure the drinking water tank is filled with filtered, treated water, wash all our clothes, and basically manage the day-to-day household activities. Most of the volunteers live upstairs. It's like one giant family since we all eat all our meals together, and live where we work. The majority of the foreigners here (9 out of 11) are French, so I get the feeling I'll be learning as much French as Spanish while I'm here. Ben and I are the only Americans, but we're managing ;-).

The most intriguing issue I've discovered so far is the distinct shortage of water here. The house has giant rain cisterns that catch rain water that then flows through the faucets throughout the house (showers, sinks, toilets...). Since we're right in the middle of dry season, it doesn't really rain much, and these cisterns have a tendency to empty (yesterday we ran out again... yay! what fun!). The 2nd source of water that we use, then, is from a well down the street. This well water, however, is not potable, so we cannot cook with it or drink it (even if we filter and treat it). Essentially this water is good enough for showering... but that word is used loosely, since really what you do id dump bucketfulls of water on your head once in a while and hope that you get clean somehow. Well, anyway... the wells also have a tendency to run out, and guess what?! yeah, that too is empty today. The ultimate source of water that we have access to, in desperate times, is from the fire department. They come and fill our cisterns with water from their hoses. But we have to pay a hefty price for that, so we have to be careful. Fun fun.

Today I start my work for blueEnergy. I don't really know what I'll be doing, but for the next few days I have to get a sense of the organization, where it is now in working towards it's various objectives, and where I can pitch in. So far I've heard about a water-filtration project one of the engineers is working on, a microfinance/community effort being made to get families equipped with batteries to power their homes, and the turbines being constructed in the workshop down the road. Unfortunately I can't take pics of any of this since my camera no longer exists, but I will figure out a way to post something when I can.

Day 1 in Nicaragua

Yesterday I finally left Buenos Aires (whaaaaa) for Nicaragua. I was wildly disappointed to discover that my elite status on Continental had been taken away since I was no longer as faithful a customer as I had been before (poopy) so I had to fly economy class with all the other plebians. The strangest part of the whole trip, however, was the random stopover in Houston, TX, where suddenly I could eavesdrop on random conversations of people all over the place. I didn't think it would be strange to hear English being spoken in all the reaches of my earshot, but it was. Thankfully it was only for a few hours... my flight to Managua was back to being spanish-focused, and once I arrived in the airport I was back to my new idea of the norm.

Managua is different than Bs As in about as many ways as possible. The airport didn't even have internet (we'll come back to that later), and the percentage of people that speak functional english is somewhere around 2 or 3... not that thas was a huge problem. I arrived at the airport without actually knowing what I was going to do when I got there... I didn't have an address to go to, I didn't have someone there to meet me, I didn't know a phone number of anyone in the organization... and the fact that internet was non-existent made all these suddenly a huge problem seeing as I had no way of finding anything out without access to my email. Oh fun.

After a few false starts with the pay phones and random people's cell phones, I managed to find a phone that cost $1 a minute to use, and I called the only phone number I have memorized... my parents. Via a few phone calls to the States and harried instructions on how to log into my email account, I got a few phone numbers to try. Eventually I got in touch with the admin here at blueEnergy and she freaked out and sent me a special driver that's been hired by blueEnergy to drive people around. Aparently the taxis here are so unsafe, no one takes them.... I wondered how there were so many cabs on the road then, but no one could answer that.

I was brought to a house that is owned by blueEnergy in Managua. No one else was around besides this old dude who's been hired to look after the house. He was extremely social, and talked a mile-a-minute in spanish that I could barely understand (the accent here is extremely different than in Argentina) but I got enough to know that he was hitting on me (gross... seriously dude, you're over 60) and couldn't believe that I was in my mid-20s and still not married (apparently 20something women are already mothers here).

I realized how much had changed in my environment, however, when I took a shower to freshen up. First, there was only one knob to turn on the water... signifying there's only one water temperature.... cold. Oh yum. Then, there wasn't a shower head, just a spout that peed water much like a dog... water pressure? what's that? and wait... you want a steady stream of water? hahahaha! Unfortunately, my camera is no longer in my possession.... I think the security checkpoint guys at the airport thought they'd enjoy it's uses more than I would.... so I couldn't take a picture of the apparatus.

I eventually won my battle with the soap and water, and emerged from the "shower" as "refreshed" as I could be. Another 2 hour conversation with old-dude knocked me out completely, and I slept like a dead person with the fan blowing over me all night.