Hola from Pajarito!

After surviving the looooooong bus journey to Nicaragua and the 1.5 hour hike up to the village, Romeo 5 were introduced to our new families for the next 2 weeks by the village leader Don Juan. We have all been made to feel very welcome, and our new families have all made a massive effort to accommodate us. Most of us have younger ‘brothers and sisters’, and we’ve found that they can be endlessly entertained with card games and attempts to teach us Spanish, with varying levels of success!

Our own Spanish is going well, and everyone has risen to the challenge of co-ordinating mealtimes, borrowing tools, and learning about the locals’ way of life from our Nicaraguan hosts.

Mealtimes, despite an apparently monotonous diet of tortilla, rice and beans, have been a source of great excitement and rivalry between houses, some enjoying cheese and plantain to supplement the carb fest of lunch. When your family kill a chicken for you, you know you’ve really been accepted and can “eat like a king for a day”!

Our work is going well and everyone is coping with the intense heat and steep terrain. Despite our initial optimism that the arduous trench digging had been completed by the Phase 1 team, we have spent several days battling through thick clay soil and stubborn rocks, building trenches. However, no matter how much we sweat over pick axes and machetes, there is no doubt we can be consistently outdone by our tirelessly hard working Nicaraguan hosts.

Our hard work has been balanced by a local music fiesta and our Saturday night Raleigh sleepovers in the community centre.

Since the above was written, our pipes arrived so we began laying them and hopefully should have running water by the end of the project and before the looooooooong bus journey back home! 

This is Romeo 5, listening out!