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.