Nicaraguan Adventures

Completion of a New Beginning

2009-11-05T08:27:00.000-08:00

The schoolhouse of Santa Maria de San Sabastion de Yali was completed on October 22nd after a month of construction, with the celebration of this accomplishment taking place on the 23rd of October. It was an unforgettable experience working in the village for five weeks, understanding the dynamics and culture of the community, and seeing the impact that this new monumental structure will have on the people there.

The photos that accompany this post will give a better sense of how the physical structure of the school developed, but what can’t entirely be told by the images is the history of struggle for the village and the prospects and hope the new school gives to the community. Our final two weeks were filled more with collaboration with village and municipal leaders to see through the school’s completion and truly understand from the people’s perspective the results of having this new structure in town.

The history of the village comes from the memory of Guillermo, the appointed village leader of nearly 20 years. Guillermo moved to the village in 1975, when there were only five families. In 1980, the Contra War escalated and began to heavily effect the Northern Highlands where Santa Maria quietly rests. However, Santa Maria was a sanctuary from the heavy fighting in the area, and families were urged to move to the area, which at the time had vast, untapped land for farming. During this time, a wood framed, one room school was built, which after almost thirty years of use was by now almost totally run down. Guillermo returned in 1990 after eight years fighting with the Sandinista Army to find a significantly transformed town that had doubled in size. But the village was highly unorganized, and its people generally opted to do things on their own rather than to gather the efforts of the whole village. US programs to teach health care and agricultural practices during the 1990s and early 2000s encouraged the organization of the village, and led to the formation of a community owned company to farm the coffee, corn, beans, and bananas grown on the surrounding farmland. This formalized organization led to significant advances in health care and prosperity from farming, although from our experience it is clear that the community has a long way to go in terms of organizational efficiency. There is no clear, rigid structure for the community to work together to provide better public services.

This is where the first, but less obvious benefit to the school’s construction comes in. The buildOn model requires the leader of the village to organize six deputies in charge of respective days of the week for construction. These leaders then organize their other eleven workers for each day and motivate them. Although sometimes these levels of motivation lagged, we made sure to stay on the leaders, ensuring they fulfilled their end of the covenant. The completion of the school in record time by the community was clearly a matter of pride to the village, and empowers them by demonstrating that they can achieve great things in improving their lives, when they effectively work together.

Besides the church, there are no significant structures in Santa Maria. The school is in the center of the main road, and will be the predominant and aesthetically dominant building in the village. The school is a symbol of progress in the town center, and further exemplifies the profound significance of education. With one of the nicest schools in the area, the parents will be proud to send their children to school and stress to a greater extent the importance of getting a good education. Before, with the ragged school falling down after 25 years of use, it gave the impression to naïve students and parents alike that school took a back seat to other issues. Parents often took their kids out of school because it was inadequate. Those that had to go to another town for school often could not make it due to severe and prolonged flooding of the river. The new school stands as a monument to the high value placed on education in the village.

Finally, the construction of the school has inspired confidence in the local government of Yali and its mayor, Victor, who does what he can through limited means to improve the situation of his municipality, the poorest in the most impoverished country in Central America. A stable government is a key to economic development, and this deeper foundation of trust of the small villages in their local governments brings a greater belief in the power of organized governmental structure.

So it is clear to us that the completion of this school in Santa Maria will have limitless, long lasting effects the most evident of which are higher attendance and greater graduation rates, more developed organization in the community, and a stronger local government.

We left the village shortly after the closing (well closing for us, opening for them) ceremony. The ceremony included dancing, words of thanks and a call to duty by the village’s leaders in regards to their new school, and the expression by us of our hopes of the impact the school will have on the community. We followed the ceremony with a massive feast of beef, rice, beans, and local vegetables that some of the women of the village arduously worked on for an entire day to feed hundreds in the village. We are comforted to know that the durable structure of the school will last for 50 years. Barriers of language and culture had been transcended after five weeks of living as three people taken in by the village as their own, and the friendships and bonds we formed with the people there will be remembered for a lifetime. What will continue for a limitless time are the effects this new place of education will have on the prosperity of the village, as we hope it will help create a snowball effect in making the community more self sufficient and improving the way of life for its people.

We would like to thank all that have made this school possible through their moral support and selfless donations, as well as the people of the community for making us feel so at home. We now turn our attention to Mali, where the next school will be built, and for which we are already well on our way to funding. Please let us know if you are compelled to help out in any way with our future endeavors in Mali and Nepal, and continue to follow us right here on this ongoing journey. An easy way to help is to spread the word to others by directing them to this blog and to our website at www.projectcommencement.com.

Salud,

John, Taylor, and Evan

P.S. Thank you to Barth Falkenberg for providing most of (and the best of) the photos that can be seen by following the link below, and for sharing this experience with us with his stay for our last week in the village.

PHOTO ALBUM:

http://picasaweb.google.com/john.falkenberg/FirstSchoolNicaragua#

Exploración Del Pueblo

2009-10-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

This update comes on the heals of another successful week in Santa Maria de San Sebastian de Yali! While building was a bit slower due to unforeseen holdups, it gave us a chance to spend more time in and around the village, and off the work site.

Regarding progress made, we've continued at a steady pace, and though delayed at times, still hope to complete the school in about 4 1/2 weeks. We've completed the walls and framing upon which the roof will be built and the windows installed. The beams which will be used for the roof have been painted, and are ready for the welder and his team, who will take on the majority of the work from here on out. Most of the physical labor is behind us (with the exception of mixing a shocking amount of concrete for the floor and pathway outside the school), and we are looking forward to spending our time adding the finishing touches, exploring the area, and learning more about village culture.

In the little free time we have before or after the workday, we've taken to exploring the hills around Santa Maria, as they offer both incredible views and a brief break from the otherwise permanently curious children and villagers (we love the interest and their curiosity, but sometimes it can be difficult to be on the spot all the time). The landscape is stunning, and quite varied; standing in a single spot, look in one direction, and find yourself in the Scottish highlands, turn 180 degrees and you are looking over a jungle in southeast Asia. While at times it can be difficult to capture on film, the imagery of this place is not something we will soon forget.

As we reported in our last posting, soccer games have become a regular part of our afternoon routine. How we learned of the pitch and the daily games, however, plays more into our recent issues with delays. While discussing that our brick maker, Bismark, was well behind schedule (yes, all the cement blocks are made by hand at the site - approximately 1600), it came to our attention that he didn't like to work after 2pm in the afternoon, and had simply decided that he could leave when he wanted. While this was quite frustrating at the time, it allowed us both to learn of the soccer games (his favorite destination), and get to know the comical character of Bismark a bit better. I've included below John's description, for your enjoyment:

"Brickmaker Bismark on top of the world! he came from another town but we were convinced he was going to stay in Santa Maria. This man made magic happen on the card table, supplementing his wages by winning a fair amount of cordobas and a bike off the villagers, snuck out of work early to hit the soccer field, and was often seen disappearing to the casas of various senoritas in the village. But he left one rainy morning when his work was done without even a goodbye, and never returned. Bismark - hell of a card player and woman chaser, very mediocre block maker"

Further set backs included one day when materials had not arrived, and another when rain finally came during the rainy season. This did allow us to enjoy a friendly futbol match between Santa Maria, and La Rica, a nearby community. We innocently went to spectate, only to have the captains of the two teams ask Evan to referee. After struggling through which rules they expected to have upheld, and trying to identify who was on which team, he was handed a watch and a whistle, and told it would be a regulation length game (45 minute halves). Given the lack of uniforms, sidelines, the presence of horses on the field, etc., this came as a bit of a surprise. Regardless, it was a great deal of fun, with Evan only slightly favoring the Santa Maria Governators (that's not their mascot, nor do they have one, but it might as well be, as I'll explain in a moment), who came out on top with a 4-1 upset victory.

With the rain keeping us from working, we took in a number of American action movies in one of the casas next to the school. They LOVE American action movies, particularly if it was made in the 1980's - early 1990's. One favorite is "American Ninja," though anything with excessive marshall arts is universally prized. This has inspired a preponderance of marshall artists among the village children, and at times adds to the southeast Asian feel. Arnold Schwarzenegger is also a favorite, and many know of his post-Hollywood political success. John came into some trouble, however, when he tried to tell the enthused fans that in the US, we call him the "Governator;" see, the Spanish word for Governor is Gobernador (and v's are pronounced like b's in Spanish, etc.) so essentially rather than telling the kids Arnold is the all mighty Governator since he was the star of Terminator, it translated to "We call Arnold 'The Governor of California'". Joke completely lost in translation.

This last week also saw Evan move into Taylor's home-stay, as Taylor's host family goes to bed earlier, is set apart from the other houses a bit on a small hilltop, and is slightly more removed from the omnipresent farm animals. One lucky night, while up reading, a freakishly large "butterfly" (BIRD) came into the room, as it was attracted to the light, and landed on the Mosquito net above Taylor's head. While interesting and comical in size, Taylor decided to swat the butterfly away, before returning to reading. Turns out this only excited this particular mariposa, which started circling the room at great speed. About this same time, two children from the house returned, and were excited to help get the insect back outside. Evan was thoroughly enjoying music on his iPod, laughing vigorously from the safety of his own cot and mosquito net. as he watched the comical scene of Taylor, Marco, and Jefferson dodge and swat at this three inch bug while it strafed our heads. Suddenly, and without any warning, the enemy found its way inside Evan's sanctuary, and landed about 4 inches from his head. Despite his general athleticism, Evan has never moved this quickly in his life, while screaming at the top of his lungs and jumping up from his cot and out of the mosquito net. We managed to wrestle the butterfly from his new found safe zone, and throw it outside, only to have it buzz back in just before shutting the door multiple times. After about 5 minutes though, we were able to get in enough good punches to slow it down, and for better or for worse, Jefferson saved it from meeting its maker it a rather painful way to their dog, with one good swat from a flip flop. All participants came away from the incident amused (except for the bug, of course), and we found it one more bonding experience that doesn't break down with the language barrier.

As is our routine, we head back north to the village in the morning, and will hopefully return next weekend with only the final coat of paint to add the following week.

Salud,

Taylor, John, y Evan

Trabajo Rapido Es Buen Trabajo

2009-10-04T20:59:00.000-07:00

Hello again from Nicaragua,

There is a lot for us to update you on, but we will start with a brief discussion of our progress on the school. Week number two was a very productive week and we nearly finished all of the walls by mid-day on Saturday. Considering that on Monday we started with only one half of one wall, it shows how hard everyone is working to get the children the new school that they deserve. There is rumor that we are on pace to construct our school in record time, and that knowledge is definitely acting as a carrot for everyone when the work gets tough.

To give you a basic description of what the school looks like, think large rectangle about 60 feet by 30 feet that is split into two rooms with separate doors from the outside. The long sides of the school will basically be left open with large windows to provide the students and teachers with a nice airy atmosphere to learn and teach in. As we travel to and from Esteli on the weekends, we have noticed that this is a very typical school design in the region.

Our next week will be mostly spent finishing the last remaining wall and preparing the tops of the walls for the welder to come on Friday to start the roof and windows. Much of the work becomes skilled at this point so we will mainly be painting and mixing concrete. We are looking forward to some shorter work days that will hopefully allow us to explore more of the beautiful hills that surround Santa Maria. We look forward to sharing more pictures of the stunning scenery that we are lucky to look at every day.

In a new breakthrough last week, we were informed that the village has a soccer field and that soccer is played daily at 4:30 in the afternoon. After learning how to get to the field (it is literally over a small hill that boarders Taylor's back yard), we decided to bring our "futbol" skills to the pitch. Much to our dismay, the fellow players were not wearing work pants and some of them were even wearing cleats. The goals were made of bamboo looking wood that was put into pre-dug holes with one of them even including a cross bar. Instead of playing a nice easy small sided game, we were treated to a relatively intense full field game. Lucky for us though, the hard work we are putting in on the construction site is paying off and our lungs only burnt for two hours after the game. It was truly a great time and it was amazing how well we were able to communicate on the field with our teammates even though our Spanish is still a work in progress. It is clearly evident that sports allow people to bond over a common enjoyment even when a language barrier exists. We are already looking forward to the next game on Monday afternoon, and are hoping to bring a couple new soccer balls with us when we return from Esteli. Next up for us will be to work ourselves into one of the baseball games that supposedly happen from time to time. Based on our collective intramural softball careers, we figure that we will just be bad and not completely horrible.

We head back to Santa Maria in the morning and are looking forward to a big week of work. Check back again next weekend for more stories from this great experience.

Cheers,

Evan, John and Taylor

Rising From The Dust

2009-09-27T21:37:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-22T21:45:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-09-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

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