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In a nutshell: through Engineers Without Borders, we have learned of a town in Nicaragua called Morrito. None of us have been there, so we can't say exactly what our project is yet. What we do know is that their elementary schools are poorly built, there is no dedicated secondary school, no library, and no internet access. So one potential project is building a library/secondary school. We have also heard about a well which was built several years ago by an NGO which gets contaminated with lake water. So another potential project is fixing the existing well or constructing a new one. In general, it sounds like we will be able to find a place to help out if we go there, so that's what we are doing. Therefore, the goal of our trip this summer is to visit the community, establish contacts, and choose an ongoing project. We don't plan to do any actual work on that project during this trip, work will be completed on subsequent trips (probably next January).
Please keep checking back on this page, we will update as much as we can. david.reber (talk · contribs)
Pre-Trip Plans
The Morrito plans page has all of our plans on it from before we left for Nicaragua.
Background Materials
this PDF has some background information on Morrito
This pdf also has descriptions for several projects available.
Travel Log
Interactive
I would prefer that this not be a one way communication. Please feel free to click the edit button and add your thoughts, and other comments. Start your comment with a colon ":" and end it with two dashes four tildes "--~~~~"
- this is an example of a comment --David.reber 10:58, 14 August 2008 (PDT)
Date: Aug 14, 12:33PM
Location: La Casona Hotel in Managua
Original Author: Kristine L.
These past couple of days have been a real whirlwind. We traveled to Morrito on the 11th by ferry leaving from Granada. We got to the ferry terminal at 1pm and stayed on the upper level which had air conditioning and a television but and cost 6 dollars a person. They served fritangas on the boat which was lovely because we weren't expecting and consumed most of our cliff bars and pop tarts before knowing that fact. It started raining a couple hours into the ride and as the sun set, most of us piled outside and tested out sea legs against Lake Nicaragua.
The ferry stopped for about 45 minutes in Isla de Ometepe where I hear they have wild monkeys and is a big tourist attraction. Lots of our fellow gringos left and got on the boat and by 11PM we arrived in Morrito (10 hours on the boat!). Eda M. and Juan S. met us at the dock as promised and they looked exactly like the picture I received from Elena. We took a stroll to through the dark town and learned a lot about the way of life there. Juan S. started unraveling the problems that plagued the city, first were the street lights that didn't work. Also the roads were made mostly of stones or bare dirt. We arrived shortly at where we staying, the unoccupied living quarters next to the courtroom. There was a well in the front that pumped water into a large water holding tank into the back of the house. Although the house was plumbed, Juan S. told us that when the water tank was installed lots of dirt accumulated and plugged the pipes somewhere which stopped the water from getting into the house.
As we were choosing bed we noticed that the house was littered with the biggest ants I have ever seen. They were three different kinds, huge red ones, medium black ones and ran around like crazy when the lights were on and little ones like the ones found in N. America. David opened the door to the bathroom in our room and what seemed like 500 big ants fled out. Luckily, since the running water was broken, when David went to flush the toilet (by pouring water into the back of the toilet) he found the main nest. He seemed to take great joy in flushing them.
After a night with very little sleep (see the obviously sleep deprived writings below) we were greeted in the morning, around 8:45 am (8 AM Nicaragua time) with a real homemade Nica breakfast. Eggs, rice, beans, tortillas and coffee. The coffee was so much better than N. American coffee. Juan S. met with us around 9:30 am and we set off taking a tour of the town.
The first thing we saw was one of the local wells. The water that came from it made people sick, but since they don't really have any other options, they use it anyways. The is chlorinated every three months and residents that use it pay for it monthly. Then second well we saw was at the school just in back. Children came to use it in partners because it was made with bicycle parts and one kid needed to turn the wheel while the other one cupped his hands around the end of the pipe to take a long drink. This well was the cleanest of the bunch and only needed to be chlorinated once every 6 months. Juan S. also mentioned that a library/computer room would be a great addition which we added to the possible projects we would do.
After seeing the well, Juan S. walked us through the back roads of Morrito and we ended up at the city hall where we met with the mayor, the mayors wife and Hector, an old friend of Albereles. As we walked though rooms being severely more and more air conditioned, we were seated at a conference table in front of Morrito's government. We explained why we were there and what we hoped to do with the water problems but then they told us they were planning to fix this issues in December. There plan is to add a large filter system to filter out sediments and alkali before being distributed into the city. This system was being designed by a women engineer that we have the contact to. This only problem is that the elections are being done in November and if this family is not reelected I don't know if the project will still happen. Also, I don't know how time we should invest in Morrito's water system if it is already being solved. Right now (I would this over a span of two days) we only have 4 more whole days and the rest of today.
After learning a lot about the community in that day we decided to travel back to Managua because we were running out of time and we needed to talk to the universities, INITER (place to get maps) and other private companies and organizations to try to build our network to better know what project we can actually accomplish.
Date: Aug 12, 2:33AM
Location: Morrito
I can't sleep - my mind is running in so many directions.
It is great to finally be able to say "Location: Morrito". This trip has been in the works for so long.
I do feel like I am beginning to get some of the context of the place even if the language barrier has kept me from getting to know as many Nicaraguans as I would have liked. These people are poor. I had never before realized just how freeking poor these people are. They need a functioning economy above all else.
That has led me in my sleepless thoughts to wonder what are the fundamental constituents of an economy.
I see a productive economy as being on in which everyone can get a job with a living wage and become productive members of society. If everyone is working, producing, trading and specializing then people can live better lives. By better lives I don't mean large houses and fast cars. Somehow in the USA, the idea of "the good life" has been bastardized by playboys and MTV. The good life is about having enough food, a warm place to sleep, a good job and people whom you love. The good life is not about being so desperate that you go to the dump for food or scraps to sell. That is an abuse of human rights and I won't allow it.
In the end, I have come to see a good economy as a symptom not a cause. By that I mean that if you put people in the right conditions, a good economy is the natural result. In my amateur estimation of things, the required elements are, education and infrastructure. These are tangible elements that we can work on. I was tempted to add good governance and health to the list, but they are largely a symptom of education and infrastructure. Besides that, I have no time for medical training and a foreigner is frequently not welcome in a government.
So that leaves the very classic items of education and infrastructure and we humanitarians have been at these two for a century. We dig wells, build schools, clinics, libraries. We have spent ages tweaking the combinations of tactics with more holistic approaches or supposed silver bullets. We have tried these things on huge scales in the IMF and the WTO. We have tried these things on small scales in the appropriate technology movement. In each attempt, there were pros and cons to the methods, but the important thing to remember is that they all failed.
That's right, in a hundred years of humanitarian ingenuity, we have not kept small children from picking through trash in a dump in Chinandega, Nicaragua.
So where does that leave me and my band of merry travelers gallivanting through Nicaragua? Do we take up the old crosses, add some interesting twist and try again? Do we sit long and hard and come up with new and untested weapons to drag cumbersomely into this bloody human mess?
Perhaps I should look to things that are currently being tried and see if there is something to be had there:
Well first of all, you are probably reading this on appropedia. Which is to say that this is the wikipedia for appropriate technologies. There have been some interesting appropriate technologies that have caught my attention. These include improved cook stoves which reduce fuel consumption and indoor smoke. Also there have been small scale irrigation technologies which seem to provide a return on investment within one year. These kind of things seem to be a good idea, but the fact is that they haven't caught on like they need to if they were to make a real difference.
Then there are social businesses. These are new and thus not yet proven ineffective. The Grameen Bank receives my unabashed praise. The only other I know of is the One Laptop Per Child project which had some of the best minds in academia behind it and still failed to compete with Intel. Dannon yogurt is in the process of spinning off a social business for yogurt. We'll see where that goes.
Then there is the internet. Oh yes, the blessed internet and it's web 2.0ness. I honestly think that the connective power of the internet is one of the best things we have. Take for instance Appropedia which is basically a giant organized forum for exchanging ideas and technologies to make the world a better place. How awesome is this site? Then there are spaces like Facebook which allow us fellow humanitarians to network and collaborate to be far more effective than before. Then there are sites like youtube which make content distribution a non-issue and provide the untapped potential for us to get our message to millions. The uncultured project follows a guy named Matt as he travels through Bangladesh. His videos aren't even that stunningly well produced, but he has still received almost a million views on youtube! How amazing is that?
So my opinion is that we shouldn't bother trying again things that didn't work. It seems to me a better shot to sit and think long and hard about what we can do with our new tools to fix this old problem.
New tools: Web 2.0 and Social Businesses Targets: education and infrastructure Objective: create functioning economies
I was hoping that this thought process would lead me to new ideas, but I have had no such luck. However thanks to this being a wiki, you may have come up with some additions and I would love it if you added them here.
As for our traveling, we got to talk to Jeanette for an hour this morning before we spent 10 hours today on a very slow boat to Morrito.
Jeanette is in charge of Own a Well's operations in Pantanal which is a neighborhood in Chinandega. They have 23 kids in a school there, 8 wells and a couple of dozen scholarships. This is all funded between the gocare foundation and the Masaya and Tulsa Oaklahoma rotary clubs. Nefer is a person at the health ministry who tests the Pantanal wells every month. Each well has a manager who is incharge of maintaining the wells which charge 4 Cordoba for every 5 Litres of water to cover operating costs
Tomorrow is a big day and the sun will be rising in a few hours. Wish us luck.
Date: Aug 10, 11:04AM
Location: Tom C's House in Granada
Things seem to be slowing down quite a bit. We wake up later and later every day and this is the first time that I don't really have something bursting to write about in the morning.
Yesterday, Jorge from Living Water never arrived so we started making calls to other contacts regarding what to do. Kristine called Janet S and she said that she could get us a place to sleep in Granada, Tom C's house.
So yesterday was spent mostly traveling. We tried to get some things done when we passed through Managua - getting in contact with local engineering colleges and the water ministry, but it was Saturday and everything was closed.
It is now Sunday and Janet S is off work so we probably won't get a chance to see her. We will be leaving for Morrito tomorrow.
Since our first experience with Rolando, we have made a couple of ATM stops. Typically, there is a $5 transfer fee and you are given the option of withdrawing in Cordobas or Dollars. The exchange rate at the ATM's is typically competitive with the people in the markets and it seems to me to be a whole lot safer, so we withdraw in Cordobas.
We have already started planning our January trip. It will be 3 weeks long starting on the 28th. Kristine, Mark and myself will each guide a small group of students an each group will spend one week traveling and 2 weeks working on whatever project we take on.
Date: Aug 9, 7:17AM
Location: some hotel in Leon
I don't even know how to deal with yesterday. Even in my head, I find myself pushing away the thoughts. Yesterday, the four of us took a taxi out to the dump in Chinendega. We were there because I had heard news reports of hundreds of kids who lived in this dump. The news report didn't have any pictures and I wasn't very inclined to believe them. However, I was curious enough to go there and see with my own eyes. What I saw were 20-30 small kids and the odd adult picking around through the rubbish in bare feet.
I need more information. Why are these kids here? What are they doing? Who runs the dump and why do they allow this? Where do these kids live and what do they eat? Most importantly, why hasn't anyone done anything and what can I do? If I am to chose my battles, that is the most worthy battle I have come accross.
But when? where? how? What is the best path to help them? Should I run back to america and waste another 9 months? Should I open an orphanage? Should I have a youtube show to raise awareness?
Date: Aug 8, 8:43AM
Location: Hotel Chinendegano in Chinendega
Yesterday, we were met at about 11AM by Ralph H of Whirlwhind Wheelchair who showed us around Chinendega. With him he brought Thelma and her daughter.
The hardware stores here are awesome. You can buy a generator for $250 and a pump for around $150. I took photos and videos of the hardware store for future reference. A bag of Cement here is 160 Cordobas (8 Dollars). Coke is 10 cordobas (50 cents). The official minimum wage here is $4/day which men can get more often than women and they are more likely to get it at the more official businesses.
I have been really interested in how much things cost because having these costs as points of reference, I can start to understand the economy. For someone making minimum wage, a can of coke takes an hours wages. Another way to look at it is to say that California minimum wage is 8$/hr and in a day a Californian can made 64 Dollars (before taxes) and could have hired Nicaraguans for 16 days on their day's wages.
We asked Ralph what kinds of things were difficult to find in Nicaragua. These include SAE washers, metal protractors, small crowbars, tweezers, vial adhesive, small ball peen hammers and metric taps.
While Ralph was leading us around, he took us to Thelma's parents house. It is composed of 3 cinder block structures surrounded by a cinder block wall. The structures are topped with tin roofs and plastic sheeting where the tin roofs leak. The inside of the house was sparsely decorated. There were professional photos of most of the family mebers on the wall of the common room. We sat on plastic lawn chairs. There was electric wiring running along the outside of the walls which suppplied a small battery backed up fluorescent lamp and television. The battery backup in the lamp is necessary because they had power rationing a year back in which the power was shut off for 5 hours per day.
They do many things for income. In a covered outdoor area they cook tortillas which their children sell around the neighborhood for 1 Cordoba (5 Cents) each. The stove they used for cooking was very unimproved, just pieces of sticks stuck into a burning area with a pot held above. This produced copious amounts of smoke which made one of Thelma's family members completely blind and will probably cut several years off of everyone else who breaths it.
In the back yard, there was a man constructing tables assisted by his wife and children. He said that he could make 5 tables per day. Materials cost him 400 Cordoba (20 Dollars) per table and he sold them for 500 Cordoba (25 Dollars) each. That means that on a good day he could make 25 Dollars profit or 6 times minimum wage.
One of the young men in the family has an alcohol problem. He rides one of the tricycle taxis on which he charges 10 Cordoba (50 cents) per ride. When he gets 20 extra Cordobas, he buys a bottle of Gwedo which is cheep, strong, locally produced Tequilla.
We finally got rained on here in Nicaragua. It was a hot, humid and short experience. It has been raining this morning but I haven't been outside.
I bought a bag of sliced Mangos from a street vendor thinking that purchasing fruit would be safe. Ralph told me that eating them was "not without risk" and when I decided to eat them anyway, he said "audios buddy" which was pretty funny. That was 20 hours ago now and I am fine. Ralph's recommendation for eating in Nicaragua is to eat anything still in its peel. Use a clean knife and washed hands.
We plan to go to the Chinendega dump and Leon today and visit living water tomorrow. The day after, we go to Granada and then to Morrito on Monday.
Date: Aug 7 10:46AM
Location: the same hotel room in Bhinendaga.
Yesterday was awesome. we went with Rolando to Amaya (a teeny tiny community North of Chinendega) to work on the medical clinic. It has been really nice being surrounded by friends on the entrance to this trip. When we changed money right after the airport, Rolando knew of money changers who sat on the side of the street holding 4 inch thick wads of bills. we pulled up and gave them several hundred US Dollars and they gave us the equivalent several thousand Cordobas. There is no way I would have trusted that situation had we not been with friends.(EDIT: after being in Nicaragua for several days now, you can find these money changers in any open air market).
Then they took us to a US style convienance store which was staffed by nicaraguans. it was really nice that they eased us into Nicaragua. I played a soccer game with the local Nicaraguan kids and they simply kicked my butt. I think that they play soccer quite a bit. I don't.
Besides that, I learned a lot about how they do construction. For mixing the concrete, we added two wheel barrels of sand to one wheel barrel of gravel and added a 42kg of cement. Then we added water until it was very soupy. Much wetter than in America but in America we vibrate the concrete after pouring to get it into all of the cracks and crevices. Since they have no vibrators, they need a wet concrete to flow into the tight areas. Also, we did tie rebar and place it into the formed trenches before pouring. Much as in America, although engineers didn't calculate and specify the rebar quantities and arrangements.
I took a walk up and down the street. It was very hot and humid. And loud. There were birds and bugs and wind noises coming from every direction and in great quantity. And the people there were porer than anyone I have ever seen. They lived in small huts, barely considered to be indoors as they had no glass and their walls and roofs were never solid, they were frequently constructed of tarps or plastic sheeting stretched between sticks, much of it falling to tatters. Almost every hut had a hammock in the front yard and they were very frequently people in these hammocks just chilling out. The children were walking up and down the road in large groups. Some of them had bikes. Sometimes I was passed by adults on the bike taxis - they weren't offering or giving rides, these bike taxis were used in a manner akin to pickup trucks - they hauled large lodes of wood or other items. Our construction site was visited by a man on a bike with a cooler in the front. He was selling frozen coconut juice with berries in it. Several of the children that were playing in the yard went to a neighbors yard and stole water melons. We sat eating these lovely watermelons when their owner showed up and started yelling at everyone. Rolando talked to him and resolved the issue.
I have heard that workers in the field get paid $2.50/day and that a water mellon costs 1$. I got my haircut and it cost 1$. We ate at a local resteraunt and 4 people ate good dinners for $7.50.
After 24 hours in the country, the thought that I find myself leaning towards is that these people don't want libraries or schools. If i were here working for $2.50/day I would want a higher paying job. Of course I acknowledge that I don't have any right to pass these kind of judgments. I need to talk to and live with these people.
I would like to visit the Chinendega dump as I have heard more reports this time oral that there are children living there.
I also want to visit Living Water - Mark's contact - as they dig wells and we could learn much from them.
We met Roberto P - the son of the owner of this hotel. He seems like he would be interested in business ideas such as the translator idea.
We also met Tom G at the construction site - he was an engineer at HP.
I would also like to visit the Water Ministry in Managua. I want to know how much water costs, where they get it from, how they drill and construct their wells, how they treat their water, and how they distribut their water.
Tom G gave us contact information for Jane M who constructs libaries here.
Date: Aug 6 7:14AM
Location: on a couch outside of our hotel room in Chinendaga
Well, oddly enough, plan A worked. Both Rolando and Albaraleyes where there as planned and we arrived at our hotel in Chinendega approximately 5 hours later.
Things that stand out in my mind on the ride over were all of the people working in the streets. They sit and stand in the medians hawking all sorts of things. then there are these really cool bike taxis all over the place. Pickup truck beds being pulled by animals is a personal favorite. After checking in, we took a walk through the local market and it was amazing. There were hundreds of tiny little stalls selling all sorts of things.
The other thing that surprised me is that everything costs the same, or at least in the places we have been to so far. A red bull is $2.50. A cup of ramen is $1.00. Our hotel (which has TV, hot water, air conditioning, and everything else) cost $50/night.
Date: Aug 5 2008 12:43am
Location: 10000 ft elevation, 40 min before landing in Morrito
The problem with traveling a lot on little sleep is that everything becomes a blur. You end up left with only snippets of memories. The slot machines that greeted us in the Las Vegas terminal. Eating greesy eggs, bacon and grits at 4 am in Texas. Trying to figure out which time zone I am in while eating my grits (it was actually 6AM Texas Time). I have managed no sleep tonight and my companions have fared little better.
This trip is so ommonious for us. None of us have experience in a Third World Country. None of us speak Spanish. We have planned this excruciatingly, exchanged hundreds of emails, come up with plans A, B, C, etc. However, in the end you have to expect that unexpected things will happen and that you have a great deal of learning to do in a very short a period of time.
Hopefully, right now Alabaralys (our translator) and Rolando (a pastor from California who is constructing a medical clinic in the north) are at the airport learning that our flight was delayed by an hour due to hurricane Edward. We just barely escaped it. As we landed in Texas, we could see it in the distance and by the time we left, there was a constant rain. The center of the hurricane was due to hit the airport dead on about 2 hours after we departed.
Plans: These are uncertain. One plan has us going directly to Chinendega to begin working on Rolando's clinic. The other is to rest up and deal with some business in Managua today and head towards Chinendega tomorrow. In my ideal world, we are in Chinendega in 5 hours with a stack of local currency and a translator.
The plane is startin to bank which means we will probably be starting our descent soon and they will make me turn this off. I will upload this to the wiki when I can but for now things are going great.