Most of us had never been out of the country before, Nicaragua was quite the christening
From Managua
we drove in an old yellow school bus to Estelí and stayed the night. From there
we drove on all dirt roads up and down mountains to San Jose de Cusmapa. We had
one casualty on this trek; a friend of mine found herself hanging her head out
the window to vomit. All the windows on the bus were open due to the heat; the
boy sitting behind my friend asked 'is it raining?' and soon realized that it wasn’t.
We were in Cusmapa to work with an organization called Fabretto. They are a
fantastic organization of school around Nicaragua. We were there to aid in
construction on a few new classrooms.
By the end of the trip my Spanish skills had greatly improved and I could actually
communicate, somewhat, with the locals.
Nicaragua is the second
poorest country in the western hemisphere, next to Haiti. What shocked me was that despaired
the obvious poverty, the crime rate was considerably low and the people were
generally welcoming and happy. I suppose, when everyone is poor, there is no
one to steal from. And tourists in the area aren’t really tourists, but aid
workers, and then harming them would essentially harm the locals as well.
I meet children who walk 5 hours a day through the mountains to get to
school. We did manual labor during our stay, but I feel like they helped me
more then we helped them.
