Nicaragua

What makes a good vacation for you?  Well, anytime you can pack three activities you like into one trip, it should make for a fun vacation, right?  If you know me, you know that I love traveling to new places.  Secondly, I really do like to help people who are in need.  Add to that, I had the chance to practice my Spanish for a whole week, so you can tell why I was looking forward to a week spent in Nicaragua.  So with that in mind, I headed out in early June, along with 30 other members of the Edmond church of Christ for a week-long mission trip to Nicaragua.   

      We were going to do some work projects and host several days of VBS (Vacation Bible School), in a number of locations.  In addition we spent time getting to know the local Missionaries and their families, and even spend a day on the beach.  I’ll give you more details about each aspect of the trip, as I take you through the week.

Nicaragua is a relatively large country by Central America standards, with both a Caribbean and Pacific coast.  The country is about 50,000 sq. miles (Oklahoma is 70,000 sq. miles), so just a little smaller than Arkansas.  There are roughly 6 million people in Nicaragua (Okla. Has 3.7 million).  The country is quite poor, with a GDP per capita of only $3,300/yr (for comparison, the U.S. GDP per capita is $49,800).  Nicaragua is poorer than neighboring Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. 

Flanking a line of volcanic peaks down the spine of the country, Nicaragua has hot humid lowland plains, both east and west of the mountains.  The Caribbean coast is referred to as the “Mosquito Coast”.  The Spanish first colonized the region in the 16th century.  Nicaragua achieved its independence from Spain in 1821, and since then Nicaragua has undergone periods of political unrest, dictatorship, and fiscal crisis—the most notable causes that led to the Nicaraguan Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.  This led to the Sandinista regime, founded by Augusto Sandino (the Managua airport is named for him), and partially funded under the table, by the U.S. through the Iran Contra scandal (remember Oliver North?).

Today, Nicaragua’s main exports are agricultural products like coffee, beef, cattle, and rum (made from sugarcane).  Some light manufacturing (think textile sweatshops) and tourism are starting to play a bigger part in the economy.  One hot topic of discussion, in Nicaragua, is the proposal of a “second” canal, rivaling the Panama Canal.  Due to the layout of rivers and the two huge inland lakes, Managua and Nicaragua, the canal could be relatively easy to construct.  The question appears to be;  What is the need for a second canal, so close to the first, and who will be the economic and environmental winners and losers?  Like many issues in Latin America, expect the debate to go on for years.  It will be resolved….maňana! 

In my travels, I have visited many countries that are considered “emerging economies” (this means poor, in English).  Is it just me, or does it feel odd to you to see a horse drawn cart running through the heart of town, while the driver talks on his cell phone?
    
Our agenda, while in Nicaragua included work projects on several homes in the city of Masaya, just 30 miles south of the capital of Managua.  We planned to be in Masaya for 3 full works days, then following church services and lunch with the local Missionaries on Sunday, driving some 30 miles west to the city of Diriamba, where we would have an additional work day on Monday.  While in both of these cities, we also were supporting the ongoing VBS activities in which over 600 kids were led through games, puzzles, and other fun activities by the ladies in our group, and a number of our extremely capable teens.  The trip wound up with a long drive down the Pan American Highway, to the beach town of San Juan del Sur, where we rode the waves, caught some sun and relaxed, after a fast paced and exciting week.

Overall, I’ll say the trip was fun, lots of hard work, rewarding, humbling, and spiritually uplifting.  That said, it was not hard to fall asleep at night, because I was tired after each and every day. 

Masaya:
Masaya is a large (~100,000), rather poor city, with lots of twisting and unnamed streets.  You learn to drive totally by landmarks, and hope the street is not one-way (in the other direction).  Our activities centered around a number of house projects, and the three-day VBS at the Masaya church. 

The work projects were on some (unbelievably) poor homes of church members or extended families identified by the Missionaries.  The projects involved framing rooms, putting up sheetrock, and putting in concrete floors (sometimes the only room, of three, that had anything but a dirt floor).  The work was all done by hand, other than a few minor power tools (saw and drill).  The teams included experienced and less experienced visitors, our Missionaries , and other local help.  It was carried out in hot (> 90 degrees), humid (>90 %) and sometimes, even rainy weather. 

 The physical challenge of making a wheel barrel full of concrete involved mixing volcanic ash, gravel, cement, and water (all by hand) in mini “volcanos” on the ground.  Then, shovel by shovel, the concrete was loaded into a wheel barrel, and poured out in a cleared, level, spot.  The wet concrete is then leveled and smoothed into a floor, and left to cure.  More than once, I mentioned how much I missed my cushy desk-job in an air conditioned office!

On the house that I worked on, for the first two days, there were four generations living there, including a grandmother (Abuela) and a newborn baby.  The work at their 3-room house included framing up and sheet-rocking the middle (of 3) 10’ by 18’ rooms, and then installing a concrete floor in the middle room. 

I need to say a word here about my Spanish.  Our group of 30 had eight to ten fluent Spanish speakers, a few with no Spanish skills, and many of us in-between.  I had been catching up on my Spanish studies over the last couple of years.  Although I am not good enough to have a “real-time” conversation with a native speaker (Kim Romero kept telling people “much slower for him”), I did great with the kids!  I could ask them their names and ages, how many brothers and sisters they have, their favorite colors, and what noises all the animals make.  I had fun playing around with it, and I hope they all had fun with my poor pronunciations and simplified “gringo grammar”!

On the third day’s work project, Saturday, we moved on to work on a different project.  We were going to install a big concrete floor (maybe 30’ by 40’), in a house that was going to have some more extended family moving in.  We arrived to find a room filled with huge piles of sand, gravel and cement.  I wondered where we were supposed to put the floor, only to find out: right under all the sand, gravel, and dirt.  So our first step was to shovel all of these “raw materials” out of the room and into the street outside, where we were going to build the concrete.  We had plenty of workers, and we quickly had the materials outside, and the floor cleaned and leveled.  That’s where the concrete building began, and went on, and on, and on.  I lost count of how many cement volcanoes that we built up and loaded into the wheel barrels, but my back and shoulders were aching by the end of the project. 

  We had a couple of nice breaks, one for ice cream, and one while Dustin handed out candy to the crowd of children that sat on the opposite curb to watch us work.  They probably laughed at how many of us it took to do the project, and how many water breaks we took, but we provided some free entertainment, and they had front-row seats!  At one point I looked up to see a horse-drawn cart stopped right where we were building concrete volcanoes.  I wondered what the guy’s problem was, until I realized that he was delivering more gravel, ash, and cement.  That didn’t make me smile……

        

On Sunday, we had lunch at a restaurant on the town square.  The Nicaraguan cities of Leon and Granada are the old Spanish colonial centers of Nicaragua, but like many colonial towns, Masaya has large “town center” that includes a large park and, of course, a huge Catholic Church.  In days gone by, much like the town square in current day Santa Fe, this central church and green-belt were the epicenter of the town’s activities.  Today, it provided an ice cream as we left Masaya behind.

Diriamba:
There was an interesting change in scenery as we drove west toward Diriamba.  We left the city behind, and drove through a much more rural part of Nicaragua.  It reminded me of Costa Rica, where you could see volcanic peaks and lush green gardens and jungle along the sides of the road.  David pointed out places where he had seen monkeys playing in the trees on previous visits. 

We checked into the La Bohio hotel in Diriamba, and it was really nice, with a lovely courtyard filled with flowers, trees and even a few hammocks.  Did I mention hot showers?  What a treasure!  We had a very nice dinner at the adjacent restaurant.  Once again, the organization was superb, as we walked in to see a table for 34 set up and awaiting us.  I had a jalapeño steak, with Coke Zero, and it was really good!

We had an interesting plan for a work project, on Monday, in the San Marcos area.  We were building 7 outdoor showers/vegetable garden combos in the yards of e few of the local church members.  The plan, which I understand came from Pinterest website, was to use 6 wooden pallets, built into a U-shape, on top of some concrete bases.  The shower is then lined with black plastic.  The unique part of the design was the wooden “pockets” that were left on the outside of shower.  These were sealed up, and could be filled with the rich volcanic soil, and planted with seeds for vegetables like carrots, peas, or cucumbers.  The family could use these gardens to grow veggies for their own use, to sell, or to share with friends and families.  As this explanation leaves you wondering: “What is he talking about?”, see the pictures below.

The concept was simple, and all the supplies we needed were provided by the local church.  In the yard I worked in, several families shared a common dirt-floor shower, and our showers were going to be a nice “upgrade”.  One thing we didn’t count on was the need for power.  Power distribution in the rural parts of the country can be spotty, and if you are a long way from the source, your power is less than ideal. 

   

Imagine that we were out there, ready to cut and drill, with all the supplies that we needed – only to find that we had only one place to plug into for power, it didn’t reach the showers, and wasn’t strong enough to power a circular saw and a drill.  The power we did have was just too weak to run the saw and power drill with any decent force.  In this case, we would have been better off with a couple of hand saws and screwdrivers but, sadly, we didn’t have them in our kits.  We did what we could, rescuing some old nails from abandoned boards, and got the showers all assembled, but the locals will finish the projects with their own tools in the near future.  It was a great idea, and it was fun to build with my team, but we just didn’t have the horsepower to get the job done. 

We finished the day back at the San Marcos church, visiting with the adults and kids there.  I can’t count the number of spontaneous soccer games and volleyball rallies I watched, with both big kids and little kids taking part.  This was somewhat of a wind-down of our mission-trip activities.  We had also completed our housing projects, or at least had left them nearly completed.  We had earned a day of rest.

San Juan del Sur:

We set off, on Tuesday morning, for the scenic 150 km drive along the Pan American highway, down south to the resort town of San Juan del Sur.  This highway is the main north-south artery running all the way through Central America, from Mexico to Panama.  San Juan is a growing tourist attraction in Nicaragua, and is very similar to the beach towns in Costa Rica (Tamarindo and Quepos on Playa Manuel Antonio) that I visited last year. 

  At the beach, in San Juan, we swam in the surf (really good waves, despite an ebb tide), rested, relaxed, lounged in the sun, and had a great day.  I spent about five hours either in the water or throwing a Frisbee on the beach.  I have a life-long love affair with the Pacific Ocean, with its deep cool waters, beautiful vistas, and cooling breezes.  I had a super lunch of garlic grilled fish in a cabana right on the beach.  

One of the real treats about traveling is learning about the local dishes.  I love to try new dishes, and we had some good ones on this trip.  It was Napoleon who said; “An army travels on its stomach”.  Making sure that there was good food for this group of over 30 Oklahomans was another thing the trip planners did well.  We had chicken dinners, and even pizza a couple of nights (Papa Juan’s, no less).  Throughout the trip, breakfast were ready for us when we awoke, lunches were provided right when we needed them, and the dinners were timely and varied. 

 

There are a lot traditional Nicaraguan dishes.  Each region,   according to geographical and cultural characteristics, produced various dishes, drinks, and sweets. Throughout the years, those dishes became known in the whole country.  Some cities still are still known as the one that originated the idea of some food and they still specialize in creating this food, but most of the dishes passed to be national dishes. 

Gallo Pinto: most people in Nicaragua eat this almost daily and it is considered a national symbol. It is composed of a mixture of fried rice with onion and sweet pepper, red beans boiled with garlic. They are mixed and fried all together.   

On our last night in Nicaragua, we ate at a very nice restaurant, called El Colibri (The Hummingbird).  I understand that this place was used by the producers of the show “Survivor – Nicaragua” to feed everyone (except the contestants, who had to eat scorpions and spiders, of course).  The place was very nice, and looking at the tired, sunburned faces around the room, I could sense everyone’s thoughts were shifting to home.  The fish and kabobs were great, and the chocolate cake and rich coffee were what I needed for the long drive back to Diriamba, where we needed to pack up and be ready to head to the airport early Wednesday.

We arrived, quite late, in Oklahoma, and all hurried for home and our families.

We’ve only been home a week, and I’m already wondering what changes will take place between now and next year (if I am able to go back).  I know that I have two grandchildren on the way, that I can’t wait to meet.  This has been a difficult year for me so far.  I have already attended 4 funerals, and lost a couple of more people whom I’ve known.  It’s also been a trying year at work, with lots of changes that I didn’t agree with.  I needed the renewal and reflection that this trip to Nicaragua brought me

 

One of the real treasures about a trip like this is getting to know the people you travel with better.  Aside from all the new people I was introduced to in Nicaragua, I enjoyed meeting and getting to know all of our trip participants, young and old alike.  They were great to work with, and fun to “hang out” with!
                                                                          Hasta el aňo proximo!

      (Until next year!)