Rising From The Dust

It is the end of the first week of building in Santa Maria de Yali, and we are happy to report that a lot of progress has been made and we are ahead of schedule! The first week has been dedicated to getting the foundation in place, but we set the first bricks for the walls on Saturday, and look forward to getting all the walls up this coming week.

The first week of construction is heavily labor intensive, and took some grueling days to get everything in place to put up the structure. Because of the village's remote location and the resources of the area, everything must be virtually done by hand. This means hauling sand from the nearby stream for concrete, making cinder blocks from scratch, digging with shovels and pick axes, tying each piece of rebar, and mixing endless amounts of concrete by hand. We will quickly take you through the progress of each day:

Day 1: The latrine was mostly dug (see last post), cinder block production began (a total of 1,600 are needed), and the layout of the foundation was mapped out.

Days 2 and 3: Trenches for the foundation were dug, sand was gathered from the river, and rebar was tied

Day 4: The rebar was put into place around the perimeter of the school. We then began mixing quite a lot of concrete (quite an exhausting process) and began to stabilize the vertical rebar into the trenches.

Day 5: The big progress for the day was filling in all the trenches with concrete. By the end of the day, the foundation was complete, and we looked forward to laying the first bricks to the school Saturday morning.

Day 6: In Nicaragua, the work week extends to Saturday at noon. In the case of the village, much of the morning is spent in church, so the three of us and the hired workers (several brick layers) from out of town went to work building our first wall. With just the few of us, we were able to get half of one of the walls completed by midday, which was a very encouraging accomplishment, especially because it is rare that bricks are laid in the first week of work.

Now that you have a better idea of the structural progress of the school, we will try to add some color to life in the village and how the work day goes. Between the many farm animal sounds and crazy dreams from our Malaria pills, sleep was tough the first few nights, but as 9 hour days of intensive labor accumulated, sleep became a lot more easy to come by. We rise early, often by no choice of our own from a rooster that makes it's way outside our sleeping quarters. Walking outside of our simple concrete homes, we see clouds brush the trees at the top of the surrounding mountains, and the air is saturated and heavy with moisture. After a quick breakfast of tortillas, rice and beans (called gallo pinto), we went straight to work shortly after 7AM. Six men and six women sign up for work each day, although often more show up to work as well and the children are always eager to help out in any way they can. We have an engineer named Napoleon (the kids call him Napoleon Bonaparte, smart young lads they are. Imagine their potential with a proper school!) who directs the work crew to certain tasks, makes measurements and markings, and generally avoids any work that may make him work up a sweat. He is a veteran of the buildOn school circuit, having been contracted by the organization since its first schools in the country eight years ago. For the most part, we work straight through the day, taking turns for brief water breaks and an hour lunch which consists of gallo pinto accompanied by a rare luxury of pork or chicken. The work day ends at 5 PM, and before dinner at 6 PM that consists of, you guessed it, gallo pinto, we play a quick pickup game of futbol with the kids or take a much needed jump in the river, often with the kids as well. In fact, it is hard to go anywhere without the following of an entourage of the village's children.

The children of the village are all very curious and not afraid to approach us or demand that we kick the soccer ball around with them. The adults on the other hand, are very timid and taciturn. They are for the most part farmers, raising coffee, rice, and beans in the nearby fields. At this time of the year, bananas are often seen transported in bulk on the back of horses through the village, and as it is considered the rainy season (although it has been a dry year), it is a slow time of year for the farmers as they pray for rain and a successful harvest. The area in which we are building was a major combat zone of the Contra War, and it is likely that many of the village elders participated in that struggle. The children have learned some English words in school, but the adults do not speak any of the language, and for the more outgoing of the bunch they find joy and humor in learning the English equivalent to Spanish words. Often our communication is teaching each other our respective languages.

It has been a successful and enlightening week in the village, and we look forward to returning tomorrow to keep our momentum going and reach our goal of getting the kids into their new school ahead of expectations. We end the blog with the story of our trip back through the jungle to buildOn's home base of Esteli, which is no easy trek as most of it is through the highest mountains of Nicaragua on an unpaved road. We have discovered our vintage Land Cruiser has quite a few quirks to her, including peculiar ignition timings, the need for improvised emergency brakes, and manual calculation of fuel levels, but it was still a surprise when 30 minutes into our trip from Santa Maria (about half way in between our village and the biggest town along the dirt road, Yali), Taylor turned around from the driver's seat holding up the three foot long gear shift with a complete look of astonishment on his face. The gear shift pole had snapped right off close to the floor of the car, and only a small stub remained. It seemed as though we would be stranded in the jungle for a while, but to our rescue came an old farmer who lived nearby who was willing to help out. We asked for some simple tools and any kind of piping he had, and ten minutes later he returned with a three foot aluminum pole. After some bending and banging, we molded it to our liking and sure enough it fit right over that meager stub, and we were able to shift our way out of that potential disaster to Yali, the closest town with some skilled labor. We pulled up to a welder who offered to put the rightful gear shift back in its place, but after 5 seconds of welding, the town's power went out. An hour later, the hum of the welding machine signaled we were back in action and we were good to go one minute later. The cost of this seemingly catastrophic event: an hour and a half delay and two bucks and fifty cents, which we managed to scrape together between the three of us (the welder explained he had to charge extra because it was an emergency and the weekend... we did our best not to get too upset about the extra charges). Let's hope our old diesel box holds up a bit better over our next month of building.

We look forward to reporting more progress to you next week!


Salud,John, Evan, and Taylor

To The Village

Hola,

We trust this post finds everyone well back stateside, and elsewhere! A lot has happened in the past few days - we'll try and include everything, and preemptively answer your questions. If you have questions though, post them in the comments section, and we'll do our best to answer them in our next post. Also, please distribute this link to anyone and everyone who may be interested - a lot of people made this school possible, and we want to be sure to keep them apprised of the progress made.

We finished four days of Spanish classes last Friday morning in Granada, a pretty colonial town on the northwest edge of Lake Nicaragua. We found it perfect for getting acclimated to the language, temperature, etc. Friday afternoon, we met up with Danilo to plan our journey north to Esteli. Danilo is buildOn's Trek Coordinator in Nicaragua, and will be with us throughout most of the building process. Given our known future in a small community, Friday night became a night of celebration (no such thing as the calm before the storm). Dinner was at Nuestra Casa, Jimmy 3 Fingers' local establishment. Literally, award winning ribs, and if Jimmy Buffett doesn't write a song about this guy, we would all be shocked. Drinks followed dinner, when we joined fellow classmates and a few of our instructors at a local bar, called Cafe Nuit. Flor de Cana, Tona, and Victoria flow while live, local music plays every night. The town of Granada is usually pretty quiet, but they know how to dance on Friday and Saturday nights. Its possible one buildOn team member was seen on stage during the night...

Saturday was filled with renting a car, and navigating north from Granada to Esteli. Esteli will become home base for blog postings, emails, etc. It is the closest real "civilization" to the village in which we'll work. We met up with Anibal, the Nicaraguan Country Director for buildOn, and planned the specifics of Sunday's trip. In the overall process of buildOn's school construction projects, the events of Sunday are pivotal, but more to come on that shortly.

We headed out Sunday morning from the city of Esteli, and after a 3 1/2 hour drive that included 2 flat tires, arrived in the village of Santa Maria de San Sebastian de Yali to a sea of excited children and adults. The village is comprised of one main dirt road that has houses on either side of it and a small church on top of a hill. It was immediately evident to the three of us the simplicity of life, and the extremity of the poverty; although there is basic electricity, the village does not have running water and many of the houses are dirt floored structures with large families living in them. The students are currently crowded into an extremely small building that is serving as a school while we build their new one. Upon arrival we went to the village church to formally introduce ourselves and participate in the covenant signing. The covenant is a way to formalize the commitment from the community, the local government, and buildOn. It ensures the participation of each in the building process, and explains again what each will contribute to the end result. The village children prepared skits that spoke to the fact that they needed a new school and that their prayers were answered by God. This became the message of the day, as many of the villagers shared their views. The people of Santa Maria are deeply religious and truly believe that our funding of the school was an act of God. From all of this, it was easy to see that the villagers understand the value of education and want to build a new school as quickly as possible.

Work started early in the morning on Monday (days run from 5am - 8pm, between minimal electricity, 2am roosters crowing/pigs/dogs barking, and the sun coming up at 5am - its a different schedule), with planning and staking out the footprint of the school, basic demolition of an old foundation, cement block making, and the digging of the latrine. The three of us obviously found ourselves leading the charge to dig the latrine, which turned out to be a 10 foot by five foot by seven foot deep hole - we all wracked our memories, and despite many years spent with Allen Breed, don't think any of us have ever dug a hole this big. It took an entire day, with constant work alternating between shovels and pick axes, and we weren't quite finished when the day came to an end. Sore and covered in dirt, we retired. Anibal assured us it was one of the more successful first days he has been a part of (he could easily be saying that to make us feel good), but either way, we were pleased.

Early this morning, we came back down to Esteli to finalize the purchase of our new car, and buy a few necessities. We picked up a 1983 Toyota Land Cruiser, 4 speed manual, and runs on diesel - it is Awesome. Evan now has car insurance for a year, so if anyone's interested in buying a car after we leave, talk to him. Definitely tough to drive (lacks power steering and a working speedometer) but is perfect for down here.

Heading back to the village in the morning - we'll hopefully have another post this weekend. Don't get your hopes up for another long one - there was a lot to update ya'll on, but its kept us up way past our normal 8pm bed time.

Again, please send this along to everyone and anyone who would be interested in hearing about our efforts/adventures.

Salud,Taylor, Evan, y John

Hola desde Nicaragua!

Hello to all,

We are proud to bring you our first post from Nicaragua. For the next couple of months we will try and send out weekly updates to let you know how the construction of the school is proceeding and about our various experiences in this beautiful country.

We look forward to sharing our stories,

Evan, Taylor and John