I have a bike...

The weather here is now really quite hot and so I spend most of my days sweaty and dirty as my work at the moment requires that I am out of the office a fair bit.

But, in other news: my Nica mama acquired me a bike. It is a really very nice one (a whole lot prettier than the bike I rode in Cambridge) with a women's frame. I now have to look for opportunities to use it. I fear that this means more sweat...

The walls are up...

Just a wee note building-wise. The walls are pretty much finished and work on the roof will start any time now (when we get an electricity supply approved for the welding).

Sadly, the building will have to be left as a kind of grey shell for the moment: no doors or windows, no toilets or permanently wired electricity, no paint. Funds, of which we started with none, have run out. There are a few possibilities for other sources of funding and we are waiting, and praying to see what will happen. We have been very blessed to get this far, but it would be great to be able to finish...

Good times in Matagalpa

Last weekend our team meeting was held in Matagalpa...closer to where Joel, a fellow Strider from Northern Ireland, has been living and working, in the North of Nicaragua.

All in all it was quite a cultural experience. As well as meeting together as a team we spent Saturday afternoon taking in the city, including a trip to "El Museo de Café", a museum not only explaining the history of coffee in Nicaragua (a money making scheme after the failure of the gold-rush in Nicaragua) but also the history of Matagalpa itself. I always encounter slight apprehension on entering small museums where it appears nobody else has chosen to visit but our lively guide and some interesting text made it a fairly informative hour or so.

Afterwards, inspired by the explication of the coffee making process we went in search of a good cup of the stuff in the city. Unfortunately we only managed Nescafé (probably from Brasil) accompanied by an odd selection of cakes, a disappointing state of affairs.

We then wandered through the city streets and stumbled upon a group of men in bright yellow suits, tuning up their various instruments to begin a street performance. This was a group of evangelical Mariachis from a local church, obviously popular with the local residents. Their singer cannot have been more than 12 years old but had an amazingly powerful voice...and beautiful shoes! I must try and look for a similar pair.

Matagalpa Mariachi

The beautiful shoes of the youngest Mariachi member

Then, as we walked back to our hotel a "hípica"; a parade of horses stepping in time to music blasted from a pick-up truck at the front of the group, passed us by. It was slightly surreal to see horses, essentially dancing, to Boney M Rivers of Babylon in the mountain city of Matagapa, Nicaragua.

Dancing horses: una "hípica"

Construction update

Excitingly the building looks more and more like a building everyday and when people come and visit the site they are excited to be able to picture what our classroom/training centre might be like. It is great to see things coming together so quickly and although the constant running around chasing materials, soliciting cheques and generally solving problems is tiring, it is definitely worth it.

Building walls from cut "stone" blocks

Preparation work for the toilet block: compacting earth and laying blocks under the beam

A general view of the site: reinforcement for the columns in place, anti-seismic beam cast and walls getting started

The building begins

It's been a busy couple of weeks for me work wise as finally, after much talk and slow progress, one of the long planned construction projects has got underway. Actually, I have yet again been astounded at how quickly things can move at times in Nicaragua as when I started work in mid-January after the Christmas break the project was nothing but a vague idea of a building shape and a shabby looking, highly sloping, plot of land. However, after only a month plans had been drawn, a foreman found, and with the help of a team of volunteers from the US last week, building had begun.

As I write, the foundations have been dug and the reinforcement for these, the anti-seismic beams and the main columns is going in. Concrete will start being mixed as soon as we can work out why the wood we have ordered for the formwork has still not been delivered to site. I spend the majority of my time organising things like this as between the complications of making sure money is available and the fact that we are building out in a small town about 12 miles from Jinotepe there are always problems.

But - I am very happy that things have got off the ground and are going well. It has been a relief to do some calculations and be reading and amending building plans.

One interesting problem that we had on site was the existence of a large, disused pit into which toilet waste from this and the neighbouring property used to be deposited. An unpleasant reality in Nicaragua is that this is the most common way to arrange waste disposal. A big hole is also a bit of an issue if you wish to construct a building on top...but we set about fixing the problem:

step 1: removing the mighty big reinforced concrete lid

step 2: sending in a man to check out the hole and begin filling it in

step 3: finding a compactor that the council was willing to lend us and subsequently realising that this machine had a multitude of problems leading to is being nearly unusable. 4 mechanics, 2 changes of oil, one tub of plastic putty, many cleanings of the filter and approximately 500 córdoba later...starting to compact earth from excavations in layer into the hole

Fútbol: km 53 vs Redimidos por Cristo

This weekend was packed, but brilliant. On Saturday the monthly Latin Link meeting was held at my house and my family all chipped in to make the team feel welcome and full of food. Good times; sharing, listening, worshipping, praying, laughing together. Kat and Joel stayed on a night to prolong the fun and it was great to be able to take them along to the youth service at church and to have more time to chat and reflect.

On Sunday morning I took the youth Bible study at church. I have done this before but normally only when asked at the last moment; being the "missionary girl" it is expected that I will be able to lead a Bible discussion with no prep, this time I was a bit more ready. I have previously felt that I have not been able to connect that well with the young people that come along; there is a range from 15 to 25 and I haven't totally got to grips with Nica youth culture yet (I think that is hard in any country). Also, most of them do not open their Bibles regularly, if at all, so in order to study together, and not just give a talk, I need to start from the beginning.

But - this week, we connected! I felt like I was being listened to and understood rather than having the sense that I was talking to a group whose minds were wandering off elsewhere...I set as challenge of reading and reflecting on passages in small groups and although I got few of the answers I hoped for, Bibles were opened and read and some attempt was made to understand the text even if on a very surface level. Recognition on faces is the best kind of feedback.

Equipo 53

There was also the chance to continue to build relationships with these youngsters at a football match between two of the cell groups (weekly Bible study groups) held in the Sunday sun. My cell group, youngsters from a small community outside Jinotepe at km 53 hosted a cell group which meets in the city. My team lost 0-3 but I enjoyed to chance to chat to all of the guys that took part, to hang out with them and to get to know a bit more about their lives. I kind of felt like a teenager again; good and bad, but I am finally working out how to engage with young people here.

This Sunday made me really, very happy.

Redimidos X Cristo: los ganadores (ésta vez)

Vienen ya días de amar la casa que habitas

These words form the first line of Días de Amar by Nicaraguan group, Duo Guardabarranco, a song which is known by almost every Nica. The translation is "Days are coming to love the house in which you live".

I have fallen in love with Nicaragua. I find it very easy to live here, I enjoy the way life goes along, I enjoy the way people interact and I see beauty every day in the landscape, both urban and rural, and in the people here. I feel accepted and accepting. I feel like a part of me has turned Nica.

It is very pleasant to have reached that point, but it also means that when I look and see injustice, poverty or destruction, which is so easy to find in Nicaragua, it is even more poignant. Días de Amar is very much a reflective song. It goes on to say "in the world so much is wrong; that man assaults his fellow man, that man assaults animals, assaults plants"...it sounds very beautiful in its original Spanish (the link above is worth a listen) and definitley less so in crudely translated English, but you get the idea. At the moment it seems like we do not love the house in which we live. I only have to think of the piles of plastic waste that often frame a beautiful Nicaraguan view to be reminded of this.

I spent two days this week at a conference for farmers and those involved in community development work on Biblical Principals of Agricultural Development. At first, I wasn't really sure whether I would gain much from this set of seminars, considering that I am rarely directly involved in agricultural practice, but in fact I have come away with many thoughts. I have been reminded that to farm the land is one of the most blessed occupations there is; fundamental to human life, it finds its roots right back at the beginning of Genesis when God puts animal and plant life under the care and dominion of human beings. It is a sacred profession, a calling, which carries the privilege of experiencing the abundance and diversity of creation but which also sees the sharp end of a broken creation. In Nicaragua I am struck by the huge variety and abundance of fruit in the market but at the same time I work in communities where this year there are barely enough seeds to plant for the next crop.

I am reminded that if we are working to try and improve the ways in which small time farmers "...love the house in which they live"; finding alternatives to chemical pest control, promoting crop diversification, implementing seed banks, this cannot be separated from the need to reconcile relations with God, the creator, the first farmer. I am also reminded that it is my responsibility too. I cannot expect rural communities to better care for their land without challenging myself to practically care for creation. It's a tough one, we talk about it frequently; environmental damage versus a desirable lifestyle but I cannot ignore the call to protect the beautiful house in which I live, and for the moment that is most specifially, Nicaragua.

"Vienen ya bosques pulmones de la grand cuidad

Selvas que aroman en la oscuridad, noches de paz"

Everto, a farmer and member of the Banco de Tierra project, sporting a t-shirt that says "King's Lynn: The Borough Council of King's Lynn and West Norfolk..."

Just another one of the wonders of Nicaragua.

The safest place to park your car: in the living room.