Phase 1 (Community in Monte Frio 2)- (July 2008)

We set off in a huge, comfortable TransNica bus and, then for the final day’s journey we were in one of the old yellow American school buses which was sold on cheap to Nicaragua. The yellow bus drive was rather bumpy and uncomfortable, but was made enjoyable by the pumping music that was blasted out! On the way we dropped off an Environmental group in Santa Rosa National Park. Unfortunately the bus got stuck in the mud there and we spent a couple of hours trying to push it out but to no avail! Eventually a JCB came and managed to pull it out! We spent a night in a local school in Costa Rica before crossing over the Nicaraguan border. We stopped off in Achuapa where the Co-operative who had partially funded the water project was based. We were shown around and learnt about them being the business behind the fair-trade supply of sesame oil to The Body shop, and about funding families to grow Flower of Jamaica plants in their back gardens to make tea with, giving them a fair price. The following night we stayed in a Nicaraguan community centre that a Raleigh group had built in a previous year. The next morning we were up early ready to be lead the 4 hour walk to Monte Frio 2 through a hilly road by a man on a horse. A jeep took our rucksacks for us, so we only had to carry our day sacks. When we arrived everybody brought out chairs for us to sit on and then just stared at us for ages! Eventually we were presented in pairs of venturers to our new mums for the next two weeks! We went back to our new homes. Jon (the other venturer) and I were very fortunate in that we had a bed each in a separate room from the rest of the family! Some venturers had to share a bed between three and some slept in the same room as the rest of the family! There were chickens and pigs everywhere, and quite a few dogs; usually providing us with a lively wake-up call in the morning. One morning a tarantula ran across Jon’s foot, then hid behind my rucksack. We used my mess tin and a book to take him out of the house! The family were quite amused at how scared I was of spiders! Our family consisted of our “mum” (age 21), her husband, her two slightly younger sisters (15 and 18) and younger brother (Jimmy, 9), her mother and grandmother (or aunt?), and her daughter (Tamara, 4) and son (David, 3). The husband worked away from home as we didn’t see him much until the end when he was home for a few days. We were fed separately to the rest from the family and anything we didn’t eat the children ate. The coffee we were given was super sweet but absolutely delicious! Most meals were rice, beans and plantain, with the occasional vegetable on the side. Sometimes we had soup. We got up around 5.30am ready to go to work for 7.30am. We dug 1.2km of trenches 15cm wide and knee-deep. We dug out two huge holes over 5ft deep which you could fit 20 odd people into, to reach the water sources. We collected rocks and collected and sieved sand to make a filtering system to put in the holes, which we then covered over with concrete. We worked for 4-5 hours in the morning and then had a long lunch break before doing another 1-2 hours in the afternoon. The locals helped out and were like muscle men compared to us! Even the 10 year old boys could carry heavy buckets of sand which were too heavy for us! Shows what being brought up in a physically labour intensive environment does to you! We avoided working in the heat of the day especially when we were walking in the direct sunlight on the sides of a hill. Trench digging on the side of a hill is really tricky as you have to balance along one side of a trench without falling in it or down the side of the hill! In the afternoons when it rained we got the afternoon off to do some “Raleigh Organised Fun” which included games like Mafia, prepared our ‘skit’ – a short play/musical, about our time on Phase 1. We played cards with our family and games with the locals. One night Jon and I played the same card game with our family for 3.5 hours!! We had a really late night that night going to sleep at 10.30pm rather than the usual 7/8pm. We spent a lovely relaxing day beside the river for our day off. We had a water fight which was refreshing! One day at work a local had found a snake and picked it up to show us! Another day we found the shed skin of a rattle snake, that had apparently been shed about 10 minutes prior to us finding it so the snake was probably quite close by! Over the space of a few days we took it in turns to go in pairs to the school to teach the local kids some English. We did the parts of the body (‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’), the animals, basic phrases and finished off with the very popular ‘Hokey Cokey’! Carolyn the PM delivered a baby to one of the villagers one night which was pretty exciting as she’d never done it before and so had quickly read the Emergency Medicine in the Wilderness’s section on childbirth on the way to visiting the lady! (On the 2nd Phase when she returned to Monte Frio 2, the baby was named after her, and she delivered another baby!!) One of the venturers suffered from severe dehydration so had to be put on a drip and was off work for the last couple of days and missed the goodbye party which was a shame. At the party we played ‘Pin the Tail on the Donkey’, sang our National Anthems, listened to a band playing (guitars, singer and a classical bass guitar), listened/gave speeches and then publicly thanked our family with a wee card. Our family had given us a letter as a thank you. The following morning we had the 4 hour walk back to our yellow bus and the TransNica again. On crossing over the border there were lots of people selling hammocks and pens with “Nicaragua” on.