Friday 22 October 2010
Nicaragua and Costa Rica recce
Latin America Continent Manager Caroline Joyner heads off on a short recce. She will travel from Managua, Nicaragua to San Jose, Costa Rica over land. During the journey she will be sourcing new projects, negotiating prices and meeting with key suppliers and in country agents.
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Arrival
I arrive at what is actually a decent hour but to my confused body is around 5am UK time after 24 hours of travel. My first challenge comes unexpectedly early. As I sleepily set off from the airport in a taxi to Leon the taxi driver suddenly turns to me and asks if I mind if he picks up his brother who has been working in Managua and needs a lift to Leon. In my half asleep state my brain suddenly becomes alert. One of my hard and fast safety rules when travelling is never ever get into a taxi with more than one person in the front. This rule becomes especially pertinent when you have just landed alone in one of Latin America’s most dangerous capitals with your entire recce budget in cash! Somehow I manage to annunciate an explanation in my rusty Spanish and grumpily Señor driver agrees to continue with just me and him.
The following day I wake at dawn to a series of heavy thuds coming from outside. A little foray outside my room reveals monsoon rains pummelling the courtyard. A short tropical shower I think…. but I have never been so wrong. As I wander around searching out a gringo* breakfast I realise this rain is no ordinary rain, this is on-the-back of a tropical storm-rain. The kind of rain which comes in sheets and bounces high off the pavements leaving the gutters overflowing and the streets looking more like rivers, and it stops only for 10 minute breaks for 3 days solid. Nevertheless, even though the rain I can see that Leon has real charm. It’s once brightly painted buildings are no longer sparkling with colour but it still squeezes out the faded glory of past colonial times from every street.
Every building I enter in Leon looks the same, a faded façade from the outside but inside a veritable tardis of colonial beauty. Generally the door will open into a high ceilinged hall leading to the first internal courtyard filled with flowers and plants. Rooms will be arranged around this and further back there will be a second plant filled courtyard. All the original features will have been immaculately scrubbed and painted. The only question is why the exterior of many of the buildings in Leon does not match the interior.
Although there are very few gringo’s around I manage to sniff out a backpackers with a café (I have a talent for this), I am not quite ready for the local breakfast, “Gallo Pinto” or rice and beans just yet.
Leon’s Cathedral
I meet our main contact in Leon oozes positivity about World Challenge and its very refreshing. He excitedly tells me stories of the projects he organised and the teams he guided last summer and is genuinely happy when I ask him if he would like to be our new Nicaragua in country agent in the future. Three hours later after reviewing every detail of the Nicaragua expeditions, we emerge from a café to yet more sheets of rain.
Through the rain we drive out of the city in a shiny Toyota truck which he has borrowed, and I am amazed to find that after only a few minutes we are on dirt tracks in the middle of lush tropical countryside. The roads are full of huge holes which have in turn turned to gushing streams and before we know it we are stuck in a huge puddle being pushed out by some kind locals.
Eventually we arrive at a tiny school within a small community. We are greeted by three Community leaders and teachers and we discuss possible projects for next year. They show us the current kindergarten which is little more than a piece of corrugated tin supported by some wooden beams attached to the main school. During the weekends and after school it is home to several of the community’s resident pigs who trot freely all around the school grounds, definitely a structure that a World Challenge team could improve on!
The remainder of that day and the next follow much the same pattern: slipping and sliding our way through the water filled roads around rural Leon to visit as many potential projects as possible. At each project we are greeted at first by one or two teachers or community leaders who humbly show us their schools. These schools really have very little. They usually consist of one or two classrooms in which they squeeze up to 5 classes at once, teachers practice the “multigrade” teaching method so one teacher can teach at least 2 different grades at once. 50% of Nicaraguans lives below the international poverty line and most of these live in rural areas, with the moneyed elite living in the cities. There is no running water or electricity in most villages and broken windows, doors, chairs, desk and blackboards are the norm in schools. Most schools don’t have the money to put up a fence meaning local youths use the school as their hangout every evening, often vandalising the little infrastructure they have.
So there we sit in an empty classroom, surrounded by peeling paint and broken chairs and every single time it’s the same. We start with two, maybe three people who have travelled from their homes at the weekend to meet us, and gradually in twos or threes more people trickle in. Mums with their kids, grandmothers, fathers, teachers, until in many cases we end up talking to almost an entire classroom full of people! They have never heard of such a thing as a group of volunteers coming to work at their school, and find the idea both amazing and confusing at the same time. Memo chats to them like a true World Challenge Pro, coaxing out their anxieties and gently making sure they understand the purpose of the project is cultural exchange as much as anything. I do my best in my faltering Spanish. There is absolutely no English here, so it will be important that all the teams for 2011 attempt to learn a bit of Spanish at least.
We leave each school to a chorus of ‘Muchas Gracias’ and waves before continuing on our muddy, waterlogged way. As each day progresses the water situation gets worse, until often schools are like islands in the middle of enormous puddles. Memo, ever the gentleman, does his best to manoeuvre the truck (which has a nasty tendency to breakdown fairly often) as close to the school as possible and I leap from the passenger seat to any dry piece of land I can find.
As we drive through the tracks we rarely see another vehicle except bicycles, but we see plenty of people trudging along the roads in the pounding tropical rain. Walking or cycling for miles between villages is nothing to the people here. Often I look back with a fright and see hands and legs in the open back of the truck, one or two people have silently jumped in whilst we were moving, no need to stop, they will jump off where they want! Memo shouts a friendly “Hola Cuñado” to passers by. This greeting actually means “Hello Brother in law” but is a traditional greeting between male strangers all over Central America.
We draw to a grinding halt at the edge of a river where we see that the bridge has been swept away. The only way we can get to the school on the other side is the walk through the river. So off we go, note books above our heads struggling to get a grip on the lose stones. The flow is stronger than we think and we almost don’t make it without falling over, but when we are greeted at the school by 20 smiling faces who have waded here through worse on a Sunday to meet us, we know it was worth it!
At the end of the second day we have seen 12 schools and it’s safe to say that this is a project rich region. The agent is still super excited as he hands me a written description, complete with colour photos of each school which must have taken him days to compile. This is one agent who is worth his weight in gold.
That evening, I introduce him to the ever confusing world of World Challenge vocabulary and acronyms. By the end of dinner he is able to converse almost fluently in WCE-speak: EPCs, EPMs, PXRs, BS8848, Back-to-backs and recces. He loves recce Ted but hasn’t quite got the pronunciation of “recce” yet and calls him “Rocky Ted” which I think is quite fitting! As we discuss next year’s itineraries he has me in stitches when he refers to all girl teams as “2011 Lady Teams”.
I show him some pictures of life in London and he is over the moon when as a parting gift I give him a mini snow dome with a Big Ben inside which I bought on the way out. He has never seen snow before!
* The term Gringo strictly speaking refers to any North American person in Latin America, however it is now widely used to describe any foreigner.
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