After a long day of travelling, all the volunteers were ready to make their way to the school in El Pochote. When the bus arrived, I think everyone assumed that another bus would be coming in order to fit us all in.
We all thought wrong.
We arrived on the 2nd July in the evening and despite being tired from a full day of travel we were all excited and eager to get stuck in.
On our first day in Nicaragua we visited a museum to learn about the country´s indigenous origins and culture which we all found fascinating. We saw various artefacts, paintings and exhibits all of which differed greatly from our western culture.
On a hot Wednesday afternoon my host mother in Nicaragua, Ruth, took me to meet a group of street children with whom she used to work with, through an organisation called La Escuela Movil. They all have one main thing in common: their addiction to glue sniffing.
It is not difficult to see that substance abuse adversely affects the community of Masaya. Alcoholism is a particular problem in rural communities such as Nandayuri, where the ICS team conducted some of our surveys.
Coming to Nicaragua with little to no Spanish was maybe not the best of ideas, especially as a Team Leader, where communication with the members of your team and with those organising the projects is so important. One would assume that language will be the main way of communicating and building relationships. Clearly communication with the UK volunteers through language was going to be much easier but we all needed to build relationships with the national volunteers, and some of us would have to do this without language.
Twenty Progressio volunteers arrived at the lively Placita in Monimbó, Masaya, at 8:00a.m. on a bright Sunday morning. The morning would comprise of cleaning the site of the ancient Petroglifs, 800 year-old cave carvings, with the help of 22 other volunteers. These included members of OrgaNica, a local environment group, a member of Project Raleigh and a doctor who worked for the Red Cross in Nicaragua. Unfortunately, for over 30 years, people living in Monimbó have been throwing all sorts of waste and rubbish into the estuary which runs into the Laguna de Masaya.
Three weeks into the project and I woke up one morning with a chunk of one of my molars missing. Slightly alarmed by this discovery, I phoned our Medical Officer to find some answers. I was told it had probably dislodged in the night due to bruxism (tooth grinding), a problem I have suffered in the UK also. An appointment was kindly made for the following morning during which my tooth was painlessly cleaned and filled and I was able to return to work confident that I had been well treated. However, for some, access to dental care is not so easy.
We set foot outside Managua’s airport after a dizzying 14 hour flight from London Heathrow, and were greeted by the stifling heat of a Nicaraguan summer. With our suitcases strapped to the roof of the minibus that picked us up, we began our journey to the hostel where we would be spending our first four days. Hoping for a lie-in the following morning to recover from our jetlag, a synchronised groan sounded throughout the minibus when we were informed that we would be meeting at 7am the following morning to begin the day’s activities.
There is a scene in ‘Cool Runnings’ in which one of the Jamaicans sees the falling snow of Vancouver for the first time, and runs back to the airport to put on every item of clothing he has brought with him.
By stark comparison, our Progressio team arrived in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, and were greeted by an unforgiving 40 degree heat. My first night in Managua was spent turning all of my trousers into shorts and trying to make the ceiling fan point in my direction.
From spending only a short amount of time in Masaya, it became apparent that rubbish disposal is a big problem here. Piles of litter are thrown into illegal rubbish dumps throughout the city, which remain until rainy season when they are sadly washed into the lagoon. One local woman said “Cuando las personas indígenas vivían aquí, [la laguna] era muy limpia”. (When the indigenous people lived here, [the lagoon] was very clean).
At the beginning of the project we began work on the construction of a new classroom at the school in Monimbo. The school, Escuela Modelo Monimbo, was built 34 years ago and is partly built by volunteers in the past.
